A decent war drama derailed
Review Resistance (M, 120 mins) Directed by Jonathan Jakubowicz Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★1⁄2
If, like me, you only thought of Marcel Marceau as the skinny bloke in the striped shirt, who unforgivably inspired a battalion of wannabe mimes to clutter up our sidewalks while they suffered under the delusion that we would give them money if they pretended to be trapped in an invisible box, then Resistance is the film for you.
It turns out, years before he was slaying them on Broadway with his look-mum-no-words routines, the young Marcel Mangel – as he was christened – was something of a notable figure in the French Resistance against Nazi occupation.
In his hometown of Strasbourg, and later in Lyon, Marcel worked with a group who were rescuing orphaned children – often by paying the Nazis or their French collaborators a ransom – then smuggling those children to a network of safe houses or across borders to neutral countries.
And it was while caring for the traumatised children that Marcel developed the persona of ‘‘Bip the clown’’, who became the centrepiece of the post-war career that made him a household name.
This much is true, and there is quite probably a rip-roaringly good film to be made about it. Or an even better one to be made on the life of Marcel’s cousin Georges Loinger, who appears in Resistance, but who really needed to be the film’s focus.
Resistance is mostly a pretty decent wartime drama of refugees and resistance fighters. But the film is badly hobbled by needing to tell the story of a man who went on to become a mime and a clown.
Shots of the young Marcel – very adequately played by the usually insufferable Jesse Eisenberg – entertaining the kids and charming the young women of the group with his routines, sit clumsily alongside scenes of Klaus Barbie – the ‘‘Butcher of Lyon’’ – torturing, beating and murdering his captives. Barbie, well played here by Matthias Schweighofer (Valkyrie) was later sheltered by the Americans, who employed him to spy for them in post-war France and Bolivia. That fact is cynically concealed in the Resistance credits’ reel.
So, while writer/director Jonathan Jakubowicz (Hands of Stone) never quite plummets into the queasy awfulness of a Life is Beautiful, he also never achieves a cohesive whole. Resistance is more like halves of two quite different films, uncomfortably intertwined.
But, it does tell us a decent – if heavily fictionalised – story. And it reminds us, again, that the one thing a narcissist in power can’t stand, is to be laughed at.
Resistance is now screening in select cinemas nationwide.