Film: The Undercover War
Release date: 3rd January 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 97 mins
Director: Nicolas Steil
Starring: Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, Marianne Basler, Judith Davis, Arthur Dupont, Pierre Niney
Genre: Drama/War
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: Luxembourg/Switzerland
Cinema is motion. Thriving on the kinetic, its action heroes are proactive do-gooders. But what if they’re impotent, incarcerated, or stripped of devious gadgetry? Then they do the right thing. A dark moral vision, The Undercover War frames ghostly non-combatants, dissenters whose resolute inaction is valorous. Eschewing the TNT-stoked inferno of the battleground, the film plays out life-or-death scenarios in banal surrounds. This is a eulogy to kitchen-sink crusaders; little heroes whose small glories are all but invisible to the annals.
Stark title sequence yields to stark opening shot, which lingers over a debris strewn pathway. Complimenting the tone of austerity, a voiceover grimly orients the camera-eye. Luxembourg, WW2. Young men are being drafted by the Nazis. Their options are to serve, betraying their country, or to find sanctuary, whilst eluding detection. Hide and seek – for mortal stakes.
Youthful student Francois has been sent to Germany to study by his industrialist father but, repelled by his university’s abhorrent ideological agenda, quits, returns home and nobly drops out. Fleeing into the cavernous refuge of a deserted mine, he faces indefinite exile as a so-called “réfractaire.”
Confined with paranoid leftists and his local love rival, it quickly becomes apparent that the most pressing threat to his survival may emerge from the enemy within…
Directorial debut of European producer Nicholas Steil, The Undercover War acts as simultaneous commemoration and history lesson. Whilst he claims that the film’s moral position is noncommittal, and “no sides were being taken” during an interview, it’s obvious where his instinctive loyalties lie. Francois – a probable analogue of the director himself – is a naïve, 20-year-old youth who eventually comes of age in the film, maturing from passivity to active resistant. Shunning the legacy of his compromised paterfamilias, Francois’s faith in the cause is transformative. This powerful credo is announced in the first two words of narration: “War. Commitment.”
Luxembourg was a strategically significant, lossless conquest for the Nazis. Comprising just over 300,000 inhabitants, its policy of neutrality and lack of armed forces proved ineffectual talismans against Hitler’s expansionist blitzkrieg. Capitulating in 1940, the nation endured four tortuous years of occupation. Under the Nazi yoke, a policy of ‘Germanification’ was enforced and national identity progressively erased. Berets were banned, and the French language prohibited as Luxembourg became a clone proxy of the Reich. Steil’s account predictably depicts Nazi brutality, but is most disarming when the violence assumes the form of toxic rhetoric, projected across a classroom.
A lecture at Francois’s university evangelises the regime’s blood-curdling, childlike ideology: “Two worlds face each other. The Aryan and the subhuman . . .” Light vs. night, locked in eternal conflict. Refusing to join the approving clamour of his peers, Francois is already marked as a man alone. Ironically, he will shortly become a literal untermensch or ‘under man’ - confined to a stygian cavern. It’s here that Steil’s moral schematics assume a richer ambiguity. Moving beyond the goodies vs. baddies dynamic of the classic war film (and, indeed, of Nazi ideology), darkness breeds dissent amongst the grimy cabal.
Described by Francois as an “empire of the buried,” the mines are a paradoxical sanctuary-prison, which exaggerates tension between the draft dodgers. With large sections of the film’s duration spent underground, the Germans are a primarily unseen menace, but one that feeds a constant fear, amplifying the paranoid intensity of the men. There’s little resemblance to the derring-do of other resistance adventures, such as Melville’s Army Of The Shadows or Verhoeven’s Soldier Of Orange. Whilst both those filmmakers share Steil’s ennobling fatalism, they also embellish their narratives with conventional generic pleasures: detonations, assassinations, and sporadic action. Ironically, these are the very attractions exploitatively promised by The Undercover War’s DVD cover art, yet almost totally absent from the film.
Despite its calculating negation of one cliché, the film ultimately re-enacts another, familiar from the Vietnam War movie – that “Looking back, we did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves - and the enemy was within us” (c.f. Platoon). The entombed inmates are beset by physical tics, illness and periodic bouts of violent mania. It’s a hard cradle for fragile egos. Rival communists despise each other, and, owing to his father’s collaborator status, Francois himself is frequently considered suspect, at one point bound and facing imminent execution at the hand of supposed comrades. Exposing the group as an edgy, vacillating entity, Steil also lays bare its class fault-lines, a perspective rare for the genre. Francois is thus considered a double outsider; a bourgeois interloper incarcerated with bolshy, class conscious proles.
Steil’s protagonist ultimately finds redemption through self definition. Whereas films such as Apocalypse Now and Platoon evoke quasi-religious symbolism, The Undercover War’s low-key heroics seem to embody an existentialist attitude. Often considered as a philosophical response to the moral dilemmas of living under constant oppression, its exponents stressed the power of individual will, and the responsibility of exercising it. Whatever the circumstances, there is always a choice. Jean Paul Sartre, in his famous essay La Republique du Silence explains how, in the face of death from the oppressor, every minor act of resistance was at once a triumph and a mortal pledge:
“Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn commitment.”
A sombre endgame, The Undercover War offers no great escapes. Competent, if lacking in formal dazzle, the film’s reverent drama becomes sedate, lulling to a clammy checkmate. Whilst more downbeat than similar narratives, its predictable trajectory detracts from the realism Steil’s restrained direction seeks to evoke. Slaying, and then substituting a new-old mythos, the narrative itself feels imprisoned by the classic grammar of the combat film. Digestion-smoothing viewing for dozily patriotic Sunday afternoons, this is neo-traditional fare which doesn’t delve quite far enough beneath the shadows. DJO
No comments:
Post a Comment