Jean-Pierre Melville's great, too little-remembered debut, and a classic example of circumstance leading to
aesthetic advance. In a snowy idyll in occupied France, an old man (Jean-Marie Robian) and his niece (Nicole
Stéphane) have their isolated household invaded by the German officer (Howard Vernon) assigned as their tenant.
Despite the defiant silence of his hosts, the officer, a cultured, gentle soul, respectfully keeps his distance. Soon
a nightly routine is forged by the trio, the uncle chewing on his pipe and the niece knitting, both wordless, while the
German prattles on, ardently, about his dreams for the war ("Great things will come out of it"), his love of music, his
childhood, his admiration for Beauty and the Beast, and so on. Adapting virtually untouchable material -- Vercos'
clandestinely written, furtively distributed Resistance saga -- with no budget or union card, Melville reinvented notions
of cinema. The story, barring the uncle's narration is, essentially one character's monologue, and, except for a few
brief flashbacks and one extended sequence, bound to the confines of the living room. This dramatic stasis pushes
Melville into a vein of concentrated, expressive filmic intimacy since mined by such giants as Dreyer, Bresson and
Astruc, not to mention the director's own late gangster movies -- emotions throb beneath cool surfaces, gestures acquire
sudden eloquence, everything is interiorized. Delicacy of feeling is shaded into the pricking of a finger, the line of a
profile, the blinding light of a woman's gaze. The spirituality that runs through Melville's work here gets one of its
most explicit outlets -- for Vernon, the patch of living room serves as both stage and confessional, a buffer zore between low-angle
fireplace flames and high-angle angelical statuary. By the time he's returned from Paris with his illusions in tatters in
time for Stéphane's final adieu, Vernon's voice and the hosts' silence have melded into a moment of mutual culpability
sublimely acknowledged and transcended. The extraordinarily evocative cinematography is by Henri Decaë. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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