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L'armée des ombres (1969)
Existential Paralysis
I can opaquely identify the microscopic flaws of the perfect film "Army of Shadows" in meditation, but I can see why it moved me so enormously and thrilled me so intensely, and how it virtually paralyzed me with endless moments of pure soul. It was made by a filmmaker, Jean-Pierre Melville, whose movies are so flawed it's strange that he could produce a film this staggeringly great. I could spot several, whole entire scenes that are massively improvable in his other works, but with this film, not a single glitch is found. The film is about French underground resistance fighters who are not only facing the inhumanity of Nazis, but their own inhumanity. They've been forced to do unthinkably painful things, all out of pure love for their country. Having been a resistance fighter himself, I think Melville was attempting to show how they all thought and felt. He succeeded; you feel the raw emotional intensity in every scene. Ultimately, I sense the true reason it brought me to tears was its consummate depiction of the always sensitive human psyche. These characters are people we understand from the first time they are on screen. Lonely, every-day men predominate the dramatis personae of the film. I relate to Lino Ventura's character without having done an even marginal percentage of what his character has. It's almost like watching yourself in the mirror, without the romanticized self-depiction and vain. And through it all it's still startling how aesthetically alluring the whole affair is. The film's color palate consists of a primarily marble-like blue, with occasional touches of a warmer hue for a subconsciously apprehensive punch. All the shots are arresting and poetic in their abstract austerity, and the movement of actors and objects is so fluid that it never excites solely by nerve-wracking camera motion, but by situational suspense and facial expression. Melville often extends moments to unusual length, instead of condensing shots, which in turn heightens the intensity of scenes to often unbearable proportions. It really is strange that a director so obviously influenced by American cinema would make a movie so quintessentially French, and yet never let instances of tension and sorrow escape its clutches. Even though it's clear where Melville borrowed from his earlier works it's all for the sake of a magnum opus, and it pays off. Army of Shadows is art, and the peak of filmmaking. It's the greatest film I've ever seen.