The Army Of Crime

Robert Guédiguian is best known for his realist dramas. Taking on a quite different project, his usual repertory of players such as Ariane Ascaride and Jean-Pierre Darroussin, take a back seat in this fact-based story of Jewish émigré and Communist immigrant Resistance fighters in Paris during the Nazi occupation. This may seem like an unusual topic for Guédiguian as he was only born in 1953 but it is characteristic of his work insofar as it has a pronounced Left political content and the film is as much about the immigrant experience and love for an adopted country as it is about fighting Nazis. Indeed the best part of the film are the sections devoted to the former aspect rather than the latter as the director demonstrates how even in wartime immigrants are still treated as second-class citizens by the native-born.

With the central character, a poet, Missan Manouchian (Simon Abkarian), like Guédiguian himself, an Armenian, the inferences for the experience of the modern day immigrant are there to be drawn by the audience. When it comes to the action, Guédiguian’s soberly methodical style tends to work against the subject matter as, once again typically, he unhurriedly works together various plot lines with little sense of drama although ultimately driving home his message about the never-ending struggle between the humanity and the inhumanity of Man.

 

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