Laissez-Passer [DVD] [2002]

Bertrand Tavernier shows himself here to be an outstanding director yet again, and one who is very much concerned with how people are, seen from a generous perspective. Laissez-Passer strikes me as one of the best films about occupied Paris that I have seen, getting the chaotic feel of everyday life and the difficulty of survival. The nasty aspects that dominated the period are there, but he finds much comedy in the passing moment which helps to make the film highly watchable. It really works as a homage to the courage of people who resisted the Nazis in different and surprising ways, particularly Jean Duvaivre and Jean Aurenche. Its focus on a film studio reminded me a bit of Truffaut's Day For Night crossed with the same director's Le Dernier Metro, but I find Tavernier's film preferable to either. He seems much less concerned with 'star quality' and his characters are less artificial, and there is no glamour that he wants to highlight. This is not to say that none of the actors are goodlooking, but it is incidental if they are. In that sense it is less of a fantasy than Truffaut's recreations, and the two stories are 'messier' and give a more three-dimensional projection of character. Jacques Gamblin is absolutely superb, as always, whether in the light comedy of Pedale Douce or a serious role like this one. He really is one of France's best actors, and is endlessly engaging. He is very well offset by Denis Podalydes, as Jean Aurenche, a very different sort of character who in many ways forms a kind of opposite, both in the manner of his resistance and in his private life. The film seems to string together countless incidents that reflect on the human condition, while capturing the on-set filming experience at the rather dubious Continental Film Studios, run by the Nazis (but not in the service of their ideology), and amazingly managing to inject a real sense of shape as the film moves into its third hour. Perhaps what it gets most of all is the sense of ambiguity in many people's lives ... they want to do what's right but are forced to compromise their ideals to some extent to survive. I remember Schindler's List got this same feeling too, but it is a difficult thing to bring off, and Tavernier rises to the complexity of the screenplay brilliantly. It seems to get the note of the times far better than, say, Paul Verhoeven's Black Book or Truffaut's film, as far as I can judge. It also features the most beautiful aria by Bizet set against Duvaivre cycling through hundreds of miles of mist and desolation to his beloved wife and child.

Laissez-Passer aka Safe Conduct is at times almost like Day For Night Goes to War - richly ironic considering Francois Truffaut famously attacked the `Tradition of Quality' in French cinema that screenwriters Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost represented since both are characters in Bertrand Tavernier's lengthy but entertaining wartime comic drama that defends that very tradition of cinematic craftsmanship and professionalism. Indeed, the film is based on anecdotes that Aurenche (Denis Podalydès), who wrote several of Tavernier's early successes such as The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul and Coup de Torchon/Clean Slate, and director Jean-Devaivre (Jacques Gamblin) told about their wartime experiences at German-owned producers Continental Films during the Occupation.

The best-funded but most despised film company in France during the war, many of its employees would later find their careers handicapped by association (particularly Henri-Georges Clouzot, whose critique of informers Le Corbeau was widely criticised as a slur on French dignity), yet among its numbers could be found resistance workers and even Jews protected by the German management who prided themselves on making the best films. While Continental was few French filmmakers first choice, Tavernier shows how many would slyly insert subversive messages into the films while juggling with increasingly absurd practical limitations - not only did they have to limit the length of shots because they could only get short ends of film to use or deal with constant power cuts but often didn't even have enough wood to build the sets because the studio sold their allocation for coffins for the Eastern Front. The company even rented out office space to the Gestapo to earn a few extra Francs.

Rather than opt for a relentlessly grim view of the Occupation, Tavernier instead focuses on the absurdity of the situation. Much of the strength of the film comes from the way it shows how people adapted their everyday life to an increasingly askew way of life, where bad actors get bit parts in exchange for black market food, extras eat fake stage food because they are so hungry and you can come home one day to find an anti-aircraft gun has suddenly appeared on your apartment roof and keeps on waking the baby. Even the great and the good of French cinema fall in and out of favour in these times just as easily as the obscure: the screenwriter of La Grande Illusion, let out of jail during the day to rewrite a script on the set, writes food into every scene because he's been starved in solitary confinement for two months, while Jean-Devaivre's interrogation by British officers during a surreal and unplanned trip to England suddenly warms up when the subject of Maigret and Harry Baur (himself tortured to death by the Gestapo) comes up in the conversation. Yet it's not unaware that events often took a darker turn, as an early air-raid threatening a children's ward, a collaborator interrupting a dinner party to beat up a tramp in the street below and one striking moment singling out an extra in a forgotten movie on television powerfully bring home.

Fans of classic French cinema will have a field day with the many references - particularly Douce, Le Corbeau, Au Bonheur des Dames and La Main du Diable as well as figures like Maurice Tourneur, Claude-Autant-Lara, Michel Simon and Charles Spaak - but they're not essential to enjoying the film. As always with Tavernier, people come first. Tavernier is a director who genuinely seems to like his characters, even (and sometimes especially) the flawed ones, and his habit of providing reasons for doing what they do made this film in particular an easy target for some who saw it as excusing wartime collaboration. Yet the film shows the issue as at once both more mundane and complex than a simple issue of them and us, with even the communist resistance who urge members to infiltrate Continental later turning on them as policy changes. But in their very different ways the two main characters DO resist, and each in a manner appropriate to their character. The writer Aurenche resists through the language of his scripts, while the assistant director Devaivre resists with practical actions, in a way representing how it was possible to covertly resist with thoughts as well as deeds.

It's slightly problematic at times that the two main characters never really meet, with Aurenche increasingly sidelined as the film concentrates on Jean-Devaivre's attempts to juggle his resistance activities with his work as an assistant director, but it's a problem you notice more after the film than during it. Chances are you'll be enjoying yourself too much watching it.

Artificial Eye's DVD boasts a fine 2.35:1 widescreen transfer, and includes an excellent 45-minute interview with Tavernier on the background to the film and its real-life characters.

Tavernier is surely one of the most gifted and intelligent of French directors, and all his qualities are evident in this fast-paced but thought-provoking film. We are introduced into the world of Continental Films, the organisation set up by Goebbels to take over film production in occupied France - a world where compromise is practically inevitable and distinctions between disinterested pursuit of the art of cinema and collaboration with the enemy risk becoming alarmingly blurred. It's a state of affairs that can generate critical situations at any moment, and Tavernier presents the protagonists convincingly, withou falling back on stereotypes.