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Le Franc-tireur
1972 Drama / War
Review
Made in 1972, it wasn’t until 2002 that this evocative wartime drama by Jean-Max Causse
and Roger Taverne was given a general cinema release. The
film’s subject was bound to arouse controversy – as has any film made since the Liberation
which dared to challenge the “accepted” version of the war and its aftermath.
Instead of showing the resistance fighters in a heroic light, the film paints a
depressing picture of war and its consequences. The “hero”
(if he can be called such) – played magnificently by Philippe Léotard in his first
leading film role – is an ordinary man whose actions are driven not by some noble, idealistic
cause, but by a simple animalistic need to live and stay living.
It is this natural instinct that keeps him alive whilst all of the supposedly better
men around him are butchered like sheep. Bleak and uncompromising,
the film’s naturalistic feel is emphasised by its raw location (the massif of the Vercours),
which is both stunningly beautiful and strangely menacing, and also by the understated
writing and direction. Although rough and ready, and slightly
amateurish in a few places, the film makes quite an impact, and should be prized for daring
to show a side of war that is rarely seen on either the big or the small screen.
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Director:
Jean-Max Causse, Roger Taverne
Starring: Philippe Léotard, Estella Blain, Roger Lumont, Roger Riffard, Robert Dadiès Synopsis
Whilst the Allied forces arrive in the North to liberate the French nation from German
Occupation, the South is still very much in the grip of Nazi control.
As they make an eastward retreat, German soldiers are intent on a wholesale purge,
wiping out rural communities with ruthless efficiency. Narrowly
escaping one such attack on his homestead, an ordinary Frenchman, Michel Perrat flees
in to the open countryside of the Vercours, where he encounters a ramshackle group of
resistance fighters. As the German soldiers are obviously
intent on hunting them down, Michel has no option but to join this group, not because
he has any sympathy with the resistance cause, but to preserve his own life.
As, one by one, his new comrades are taken out, Michel begins to realise that his
chance of survival is becoming very remote…
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