French Cinema: The Army of Crime (2009)

What would you do if you were a nice family of Parisian Jews, communists, Spaniards, Italians, Armenians, living as political and religious refugees from other parts of Europe, and you found yourself suffering once again
under the thumb of the Nazis and their collaborating stooges?  What if you found your family terrorized by thugs, and rounded up for being Jews and sent to death camps in other parts of Europe?   You would raise hell.  This film, drawn from historical events known as the Affiche Rouge is the riveting account of how this resistance cell was born and how with grim inevitability, it passed into history.  

The group was led by Missak Manouchian, an Armenian Communist who had already seen at close hand the lesser known genocide against the his own people in Turkey.   At first they were independent and freelance, shooting a soldier here an officer there, and the occasional bombing of a wine and cheese party or brothel,    but they were later organized with outside help towards more ambitious acts of terrorism.

  Missak chooses to lead them and reluctantly begins to join in the slaughter against his own personal ethics against killing.  Incredibly, two of the young men most intimately involved in the killing continue to pursue their academic careers and participation in a swim team, his lovely ginger-haired Jewish girlfriend engaging in playful banter at the poolside. 

In a slow motion tragedy the boy comes home having just missed having his whole family being transported to Auschwitz, while his girlfriend, also having missed the excursion ends up selling herself to a French collaborator in order to save herself from the same fate, in exchange for personal survival and vague and empty promises to ensure the safety of her family.

When Missak's higher up, a Soviet Agent urges him to increase the visibility of the targets because of the lack of play in the French papers, he reluctantly goes after an SS general.  This is successful but brings down the full wrath of the Third Reich upon his group.  The resulting dragnet, apprehensions, tortures and interrogations, and show trial were given great publicity by the Nazis and Vichy who tried to make the 23 tried and executed into poster children for the sinister influences of foreign communists and Jews. Instead, they became a rallying point for still further acts of resistance, as history showed. 

This was an excellent film, told with great sympathy and stark realism.  I found it a gripping story, and I could scarcely pull myself away once the story got rolling to its sad ending and epilogue.