A psalm to the Strong Woman and to the force and ferocity of her love, based on a true story of a Resistance leader's wife who wrested her man from the clutches of the Gestapo. Writer-director Claude Berri (who has treated the WWII period before, in The Two of Us and in Uranus) is as technically smooth and proficient a filmmaker as he is a sober and sensible one. In particular, the roundup of Resistance leaders, the film's centerpiece, is a magical feat of engineering, of drawing several loose strands into a tidy little knot, of transforming Enough Rope into a wrangler's lariat, as an unobtrusive lady-in-red lackadaisically tails a likely suspect from cable car to secret rendezvous. (This scene is shot at the actual locale, the office and home of Berri's childhood doctor: "personal" filmmaking indeed.) And our subsequent sight of this woman, back in uniform as a Gestapo secretary, gives us the "banality of evil" in a nutshell: typing away routinely, never missing a beat or batting an eye, while the infamous Klaus Barbie tortures the screaming hero ten feet away in the same room. Throughout, the facts, the events, the actions are allowed to speak for themselves. To hype them would be to cheapen them. Carole Bouquet, Catherine Deneuve's successor in Chanel ads, has been seen too seldom on screen since her debut in Buñuel's swan song, That Obscure Object of Desire, and she comes across here, with her face scrubbed for the occasion, as less the heir to Deneuve than to Romy Schneider (the late, the lamented): a few degrees cooler in emotional temperature, and without the same sparkle of humor, but equally high in vulpine intelligence. She wears a dress equally well, too, and if the sharp lines of her features have been smudged a bit by age, this will count as an asset to her aura of vulnerability and so an asset to her role in the movie. And any lack of acting range only feeds the impression of unfaltering resolve. Daniel Auteuil, Patrice Chereau, Jean-Roger Milo. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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