Review: ARMY OF CRIME

Robert Gudiguian’s ARMY OF CRIME is a new fact-based French thriller that recounts the guerilla-style exploits of the ‘Manouchian Group’, Paris-based Jews, communists, and immigrants who waged an armed struggle against Nazi occupation in the early 1940′s. These were a famed group of Resistance fighters; men and women who constantly risked their lives to murder Germans who were occupying their country led by an Armenian poet and factory worker named Missak Manouchian (played by Simon Abkarian). There is so much inherent drama in what the Germans did during the The Holocaust that it’s not surprising that it’s such an oft-visited topic for many filmmakers. While ARMY OF CRIME doesn’t break any new ground it’s a rousing political thriller that, at nearly 2 ½ hours, is always absorbing and tense.

Army of Crime opens with the major characters captured and being driven to a show trial that will precede their deaths as a voiceover identifies them and informs us that they all died for France. The film then flashes back to tell how the members of the group came together, and focuses on a dozen or so different characters. Their leader is the seemingly gentle Armenian poet Missak Manouchian. His time as a political prisoner seeing his comrades murdered gradually turns him from peaceful propagandist to one capable of tossing a hand grenade into a German marching squad. Other key members include hotheaded young French Jew Marcel (Robinson Stevenin), a swimming champion who begins assassinating Nazi officers on the streets to avenge his father’s deportation, bold young Hungarian Marxist Thomas (Gregoire LePrince-Ringuet), who becomes an expert in explosives, Missak’s pretty, devoted wife Melinee(Virginie Ledoyen) and Marcel’s red-haired girlfriend Monique (Lola Naymark). This group’s actions quickly escalate from tossing flyers from a rooftop to mass murder and Missak and his comrades are soon under constant danger of discovery by the Nazis.

Director Guediguian orchestrates some intense, nail-biting scenes as the movement carries out a series of precision-planned attacks and it’s amazing that they got away for it as long as they did. Guediguian doesn’t cut away from the graphic horrors of war, with a torture-by-blowtorch scene that will have the most jaded filmgoers in the crowd squirming. What I like most about this film is its sobriety, dispassion and sophistication in tackling the topic. There’s no idealization of the resistance group, but instead they’re shown as reckless, with passion stronger than their organization skills. Marcel asks an off-duty German soldier for a light and then shoots him at close range in a crowded park. They are shown as overconfident at and often at odds with each other’s goals. The villains are not just the Germans but the French people themselves. The real horror is not necessarily the scenes of death and torture but the ordinariness of a landlady casually outing a tenant in her own building or a French detective who lies to Monique about helping her captured parents in exchange for sexual favors. Based on carefully researched historical facts which avoids cliches and false glorifications, ARMY OF CRIME uses a large, wide canvas for its characters and there are a lot of plot strands that require some attention to follow, but it’s involving, fascinating stuff, and a great evocation of a place and time. We root for this group and admire their courage though we’re informed at the outset that they are doomed and we’re reminded that what war creates is not simple heroes or villains but, rather, warriors.

4 of 5 Stars