Saul Dibb (2014)

Irène Némirovsky was of Russian Jewish origin but converted to Roman Catholicism in France in 1939.  Three years later, she was nevertheless arrested as a Jew and died in Auschwitz, at the age of thirty-nine.  Némirovsky had become a well-established novelist during the 1930s and conceived Suite Française as a sequence of five novels.  She completed the first two (with a basic plot outline for the third) before her death.   The manuscript, in tiny writing, was contained in a single notebook.  According to Wikipedia, Némirovsky’s elder daughter, Denise:

‘… kept the notebook … for fifty years without reading it, believing that it would … be a journal or diary too painful to read. In the late 1990s, however, having made arrangements to donate her mother’s papers to a French archive, Denise decided to examine the notebook first. At last discovering what it contained, she instead had it published in France, where it became a bestseller in 2004.’

The discovery of surprises, through writings that a loved one has left behind, is a not unfamiliar movie starting point (The Bridges of Madison County, for example).  Saul Dibb and Matt Charman, who wrote the screenplay for Suite Française, could have been forgiven for making use of this narrative prop:  the circumstances in which Némirovsky’s manuscript came to light are an integral part of the book’s cachet.   But there’s no mention of this at the start of the film, which opens with newsreel of the German occupation of Paris in June 1940.  This is followed by ‘Bussy, one week later’, and Bussy is where virtually all the action of the story takes place.  (You’d think from the terse title card that the place was as self-explanatory as Paris:  it’s a small country town to the east of the capital.)  Only at the end do legends on the screen explain the extraordinary afterlife of Némirovsky’s text.

Suite Française is mostly well acted and there are good individual scenes but it feels generic – par for the course for a drama about the Nazi occupation of France, with the main characters’ divided loyalties gradually intensifying and converging.  Saul Dibb’s resistance to the opening cliché mentioned above is not a sign of things to come.  Whenever a gramophone starts to play, there’s always a close-up of needle engaging with black Bakelite.  When the Germans are searching the houses of Bussy for an escaped man, a hand-held camera hurtles after them.  The rural setting lacks texture and any real sense of hierarchy.  Madeleine, a farmer’s wife, protests – in a vain attempt to prevent a German soldier being billeted with her family – that they don’t even have running water in the house; yet it and Madeleine are as clean and tidy as the more urban elements of the setting.  When the farmer, Benoît, kills Bonnet, a Nazi officer, and is on the run, he’s hidden in the house of Mme Angellier and disguised in a suit and tie from the wardrobe of her absent son (now a prisoner of war).  Benoît looks more at home in these smart clothes than he did in horny-handed-rustic gear.

The central relationship is between Mme Angellier’s daughter-in-law, Lucile, and Bruno von Falk, the German officer billeted in the Angellier house.  The climax to the film is Lucile’s drive to Paris, with the hunted Benoît concealed in her car.  There’s a shootout at a checkpoint; the two German soldiers manning it are killed and Benoît is injured; Bruno arrives in the immediate aftermath but his feelings for Lucile mean that he lets her and Benoît continue their journey.  The action in the film derives mostly from Dolce, the second part of Némirovsky’s material, which is a third-person narrative.  It’s not surprising that Saul Dibb and Matt Charman have found it convenient to give Lucile chunks of explanatory voiceover but this concludes oddly.  After the checkpoint sequence, her voiceover looks forward to the end of the war.  She explains that she never saw Bruno again and heard that he died on the Eastern Front – ‘or perhaps he just disappeared, like me …’  Those last words seem briefly to fuse the voice of Lucile with the fate of Irene Némirovsky – to uncomfortable effect.  It’s particularly uncomfortable when the scriptwriters have just felt it necessary to invent a more ‘dramatic’ ending than Némirovsky actually wrote.

In the lead role, Michelle Williams displays her customary intelligence, skill and taste:  she’s especially subtle and strong in conveying Lucile’s early awareness of being attracted towards a German officer and the impossibility of such feelings.  Bruno is a rather hackneyed idea:  his Nazi uniform disguises a sensitive soul – the latter proved by the piano music that he composes and plays.   (You would put money on this music actually being the work of Alexandre Desplat:   the main credit for score goes to Rael Jones but the Wikipedia article implies that Desplat, who left the project midway through, did write Bruno’s ‘Suite française’.)  It’s fortunate for the film that Matthias Schoenaerts, who plays Bruno, is genuinely sensitive in the role, and convincing – as a man experienced in separating his duties from his feelings but finding that separation increasingly difficult to sustain.  Schoenaerts is powerfully eloquent in the sequence in which Bruno commands a firing squad, charged to dispatch the Viscount de Montmort, the mayor of the town.  (A collaborationist, Montmort nevertheless pays the ultimate price, on behalf of Bussy, for the killing of Bonnet and the refusal of those hiding Benoît to hand him over.)

Excellent as both Williams and Schoenaerts are, it’s hard to be compelled by the story of Lucile and Bruno.  It’s a weakness of Suite Francaise that it has neither a strong central thread nor the scope to involve you in the life of the larger Bussy community – in spite of good performances too from Sam Riley (Benoît), Ruth Wilson (Madeleine), Lambert Wilson (Montmort) and, especially, Harriet Walter (the mayor’s wife).  Walter’s tensile strength exposes the limitations of Kristin Scott Thomas’s Mme Angellier.  She has one good moment, when Mme Angellier says goodbye to the farmer, who is wearing her son’s clothes, and embraces him as if he really were the son.  Otherwise, Scott Thomas is entirely pictorial – quite lacking in energy, vocal variety and authority.  It seems that Mme Angellier is meant to be bitterly formidable; she comes across as merely querulous.  In an interview with Radio Times, to coincide with the release of Suite Française (BBC Films is one of the companies behind the film), Kristin Scott Thomas reiterates that she’s fallen out of love with movie acting – ‘I no longer want film to be my primary source of existence (sic)’.  Does this really mean, as the RT article suggests, her ‘retirement from the big screen’?   If it does, she’ll be doing me, as well as herself, a big favour.

18 March 2015