The mime of his life
RESISTANCE ★★★
(Cert 15, 121mins. On major platforms from today)
THIS disjointed Second WorldWar drama is based on a riveting true story. Before he got trapped in that invisible box, mime artist Marcel Marceau was a hero of the French Resistance. Director Jonathan Jakubowicz’s slightly disorientating framing device reveals another little-known fact about Marceau: he was also a liaison officer to General George S Patton.
In 1945 Nuremberg, Patton (Ed Harris) is addressing American troops with a stirring speech about the courage of the untrained civilians who resisted Hitler. “I have just heard an incredible story,” he booms. “I’d like to share it with you.”
Then we jump back to Strasbourg, 1938, to learn how Marceau (a slightly miscast Jesse Eisenberg) deployed his artistic talent in the fight against the Nazis.
Marceau, then Marcel Mangel, was the son of a kosher butcher and was sneaking out at night to perform a cabaret routine in a seedy nightclub.
But when 123 Jewish orphans are dumped at the German border, he reluctantly agrees to help his brother Alain (Félix Moati) and his friend
Emma (Clémence Poésy) take care of them.
Marcel uses his mime routine to coax the children out of their grief and teach them how to hide in trees “like a squirrel” to evade capture.
Inspired, he trains himself to become a forger, knocking out fake passports for the kids and changing his surname on papers to the lessJewish-sounding Marceau.
Then, in a sudden leap, he’s in Lyon with Alain and Emma to join the fight against SS Obersturmführer Klaus Barbie (Matthias Schweighöfer).
Eisenberg’s mime skills aren’t quite up to scratch and not all of the action scenes are entirely convincing. One, where he uses his fire-breathing skills to kill a guard, feels a bit overcooked.
His most thrilling escapade involves smuggling Jewish orphans across the Alps. In an almost unbearably tense scene, Marceau is dressed as a Scoutmaster and must try to convince Barbie and his patrol that his allAryan troop is heading off on a purifying hike.
If that statue of Baden-Powell is on your hit list, you’ll be shocked to learn this great escape was performed with the full cooperation of the Scout movement.
The abuse was revealed by a team of investigative reporters who quickly discovered a cover-up. But this important film doesn’t stop there, broadening out the scandal to take in the money-making machine of modern athletics.
The film begins with young gymnast Maggie Nichols, left, relating how she stopped attending school to chase an Olympic dream.After relating how her 2015 complaint about Nassar was ignored, the film winds back the clock to 1976 to show 14-year-old Romanian Nadia Comaneci wowing fans at the Montreal Olympics.
From this point, women’s gymnastics would become a sport performed exclusively by adolescent girls.
When Comaneci’s trainers Márta and Béla Károlyi defected to theWest in 1981, they were quickly recruited by governing body USA Gymnastics.
Over the next four decades, they would effectively snatch American children from school teams and clubs to take part in brutal training camps.
Mental and physical abuse would be so commonplace that Nassar could hide in plain sight.When medals led to advertising deals, the USAG put marketing executive Steve Penny in charge. Under him, negative stories were quashed and abuse claims covered up.
In January 2018, Nassar was sentenced to 40-175 years in prison after testimony from 156 of his victims. He had already been sentenced to 60 years for possession of child pornography. If this is the new Olympic dream, hopefully this film will be its wake-up call.