We’re probably going to be slowly working through the filmography of Jean-Pierre Melville next. This director is considered a spiritual father of the French New Wave and this was his first feature film, itself based on a book written when France was under occupied by Nazi Germany. It’s such an impressive film that does so much with so little. Most of it consists of just the same three people in a salon, and this is very much a monologue driven film. Yet it conveys so much of the pain and humiliation of being occupied and how one must passively resist even when active resistance is impossible.

In a village in occupied France in 1941, German soldiers arrive at a house where an elderly man and his niece live. They serve him an official document and the niece goes upstairs to show the soldiers the rooms inside their house. Some days later, a German officer shows up and introduces himself as Werner von Ebrennac. He explains that he is to be lodged in their house and acknowledges that it is an imposition against their will. The uncle and his niece refuse to speak to him and Werner doesn’t force them to. Weeks and then months pass like this. Werner returns from his duties in the evenings, knocks on their door and comes in by himself. He speaks without them responding, about his background as a composer, about his love of France and French culture, about his travels and about how he is convinced that the current war is good for both Germany and France. He likens the relationship between the two countries as a marriage and clearly wants to woo the niece yet her only response is the merest quiver of her fingers as she does her knitting work by the fire.

This is really all there is to the film, with the exception of the scene where Werner goes on leave in Paris and speaks with some of his compatriots. There he learns that his fellow Germans have a very different view of the invasion than his own rose-tinted version. The uncle and the niece never speak to him but a narrator provides the uncle’s internal perspective of their interactions. Even without making a sound, the two, despite their best efforts to remain impassive, do react to their unwanted guest. Their body language and the movement of their eyes are enough to convey that they are aptly listening to every word of his stories. At first we can see from the stiffness of their bodies and the determined looking away of their eyes, how repelled they are by Werner comparing France and Germany to the Beauty and Beast. When he has a change of heart after learning about the ugly truth of the invasion, they can’t help but warm to him, though they remain unspeaking. It’s a powerful film that manages to convey so much emotion with such a minimalistic mise-en-scène.

If the German soldier had been abrasive or overtly aggressive, the situation would have been so much simpler. They would then be forced to comply with his orders under the explicit threat of violence. The dilemma here is that he is civilized, courteous and genuinely seems to mean well, yet he is still very much the enemy. Any form of amicable interaction with him feels like a tacit capitulation to an unpalatable reality. For those too physically weak to actively resist the invaders, this form of passive resistance becomes the only possible recourse, to do the minimum necessary to comply and to never pretend that they are friends. It’s remarkable that the book was secretly distributed under German occupation to encourage the French population to mentally resist even if physically fighting back is impossible and this film does an impressive job adapting it. I understand that it was even shot mostly in the home of Jean Bruller, the writer of the original book.

Many times I keep going back to these old classics and wonder how good they really are and whether they’re too much a product of their time to be relevant today. So it’s wonderful to encounter treasures like this that is not only fantastically good but even have new, interesting things to say about so crowded a field as the Second World War. I look forward to many more great experiences from this director who was such a great influence on the French New Wave.