Army of Shadows

All war films follow a series of episodes in the lives of their characters. The average war films, full of bluster and bravado, leverage these scenes into grand moral statements on the nature of war and indeed mankind itself. They use these vignettes in the lives of their characters like bricks, building towards an edifice that will cast its shadow over what has been seen – the film deems itself “true” or demands consideration as truth itself. The great war films, however, don’t reach for morality because it is far too simple a framework for a complex machine such as armed conflict and the subterfuge that accompanies it. Tim O’Brien wrote in his novel, The Things They Carried, that “a true war story is never moral.” If you get to the end of a war story and feel uplifted, then you have been lied to, made a sucker to the kind of propaganda that has compelled millions to their deaths across the diverse lands and millennia of human existence.

Army of Shadows never instructs its viewers how they must feel. The characters, amalgamations of various Resistance heroes, move towards their fate resolutely; they are on a fixed path and commit themselves to accomplishing as much resistance as possible before their work exacts its terrible price. Gerbier, played by a stoic and focused Lino Ventura, reveals in a key scene that he doesn’t believe in death and that if he continues his disbelief in his mortality right until the moment that he is terminated, then it will be like not dying at all. He decides to stand his ground when challenged by a firing squad, but after a German officer takes several potshots at him, he runs – he runs because he still believes in a free life for himself and for France, and perhaps because he still doesn’t believe in dying. He still carries hope and so he defies death to take him.

If there is meaning to be found in true war stories (be they films or novels), then perhaps it is that everything the viewer sees or hears is the truth, regardless of whether it happened or not. Historical events are entirely subjective to the thousands of people that experience them, and the sum total of thousands of individual realities colliding together can never equal a neatly wrapped parcel of morality, a uniform message tied together by the twined string of circumstance. These episodes are not chapters neatly demarcated in their characters’ lives; rather, they are a continuation of life itself, with all its excitement and drudgery in equal measure, stories told until the book is closed by their own hand or, in the case of many Resistance fighters, by the hand of an indifferent, inevitable, and completely human fate. Army of Shadows is true in its tragedy and haunting in its fatalism, becoming a film less about heroes and more about the bad times that produce great people, humans upon whom posterity will confer heroism from the safety and distance of their own time.