France, 2026, historical, director: Xavier Giannoli, starring: Jean Dujardin, Nastya Golubeva-Karaks, August Diehl. It all started very innocently: in the 1920s, French newspaper editor Jean Luchaire and his German friend Otto Abetz, who was in love with France, held meetings in Paris aimed at bringing the two nations together. They called themselves pacifists and promoted Franco-German friendship. The hatchet had to be buried; our children should never fight again. And all that. A familiar story, isn't it?
Then Otto was recruited by the Nazis and expelled from France. He returned to Paris as an occupier, and not just anyone, but as the German ambassador. “I came to help, so it wouldn’t end up like in Poland,” he would say.
“Are the communists any better?” Thus began the story of Luchaire’s collaboration, later recounted to the viewer by his daughter, Corinne, a once fairly popular actress. We hear the story from an unreliable narrator who tries to find excuses for her father’s actions and her own unwillingness to face the truth. Yet the story only gains from this, as we see with our own eyes how ideas that initially seem innocent turn horrific. Step by step, Luchaire sinks into cooperation with the devil.
The Germans are here for a long time, if not forever; we have to learn to coexist with them. We need to secure a special place for France in the New Europe. We should have extended a hand to Germany after the First World War. We didn't do it. Now, perhaps, the Germans will do it with us. The people should remain neutral and wait. A divided country is weaker, easier to manipulate…
Who became a collaborator, and for what reasons? When do you become a collaborator? Is it when you attend cocktail parties organized by the occupiers? When you set up a shell company because regular businessmen don't want to trade directly with the Germans? When you become a mouthpiece for the occupational regime?
You can try to justify yourself by claiming you saved a few lives from death, but you allowed millions to be killed by agreeing with the policy of the occupiers. A truly brilliant movie about the origins of collaborationism, about how easy it is to manipulate people, about how one generation inherits the choices of another, and about the inevitable “we didn’t know, of course.” Interestingly, the role of the daughter was played by a Russian actress who was included in the list of foreign agents due to her anti-war stance, work in independent media, and coverage of the Russian government's actions. The role of her father was played by Jean Dujardin, and in my opinion, this is one of his finest performances. He portrayed the character's tragic contradictions with total magnetism.
The text was originally written in Ukrainian translated with the help of Google Translate
The poster is taken from the internet.
