Army of Shadows

I don’t get it. Not the film itself, which I get well enough, but the reaction of critics. While I would call this film good but not great, some hailed it as the best film of the year, and it received the highest Metacritic rating I’ve seen yet. Certainly the film is well acted and directed, meticulously made and psychologically probing, but it is also long and slow and implausible in parts. Jean-Pierre Melville’s career was somewhat swamped by the New Wave, but his work has been in a process of restoration lately and Army of Shadows is certainly worth the U.S. distribution it never received before last year. A story of the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation of WWII, it’s characters are morally compromised to be sure, and one prison break fails utterly, while another is swift and chancy, but yet another is something out of Mission: Impossible. Ultimately the maquis operate more like a gang with omerta, rather than a political movement based on patriotism, a self-fulfilling and self-destroying conspiracy that seems to have no connection to public action or the populace at large. The careful mise en scene and consistent blue-green palette that can seem almost monochrome give the film an air of quality, but it’s not thrilling enough to be a thriller, nor consistent enough to be profound. IMHO. (1969/2006, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-99.)