L’Armée des Ombres (Army of Shadows)

by Jean-Pierre Melville

Melville is one of the great directors of our time. The film captures what a difficult, extremely dangerous and often hand-to-mouth thing the Resistance was – how survival was a matter of chance often. It’s a real-life Resistance film. He doesn’t glamorise it, he doesn’t downplay heroism, but it’s heroism on a human scale. It was one of the first movies where you can really feel and empathise with the main characters – it’s brilliantly acted. It also shows up the loyalties and the disloyalties and all the uncertain currents that were around in France, who could you trust, who couldn’t you trust, and so on.