Les Patates (1969)
Directed by Claude Autant-Lara

Film Review

In the twilight of his remarkable career, director Claude Autant-Lara returned to the subject of one of his earlier great films, La Traversée de Paris (1956). Both films portray life under Nazi occupation during WWII with a curious mixture of harsh realism and wry humour, and both provide an uncompromising testimony of the hardship and humiliation endured by most ordinary French people at that time.

Although Les Patates is a modest work in comparison with Autant-Lara's earlier achievements (Douce, Sylvie et le fantôme, Le Blé en herbe), it is not without its charms.  It may lack the inspired touch of the director's previous films, but strong performances and a well-crafted script make it a fairly absorbing piece, one that sheds some light on France's darkest era. When it was first released, the director's popularity had waned considerably (thanks largely to the vitriol heaped upon him by the firebrand critics on the Cahiers du cinéma - Truffaut et al.), and so the film was pretty comprehensively ridiculed - somewhat unfairly. After this, Autant-Lara made just two more films for the cinema, Le Rouge et le blanc (1972) and Gloria (1977), as well as directing the mini-series Lucien Leuwen for French television in 1973.

Film Synopsis

In 1942, France is under Nazi Occupation and the country is divided in two, with the north controlled by the Germans and the south governed by the Vichy administration.  Between these two there is a third, forbidden, zone, into and out of which movement is strictly controlled.  Bourg-Fidèle, a little town in the Ardennes, lies in this zone, and because of the lack supplies its inhabitants are on the brink of starvation.  When he uses up his last sack of potatoes, foundry worker Clovis Parizel finds he must undertake a perilous journey into the Free Zone in the south to collect some potatoes from the relatives of an old friend of his.

After a nerve-racking journey in which he narrowly escapes capture by the Nazis, Clovis arrives home safe and sound and immediately plants his hard-won seed potatoes in an unused plot of land.  Fearful that his crop may be stolen, he constructs a wall around the plot, with a gate which he intends keeping locked at all times.  Despite all of these precautions, Clovis later finds that the soil around his precious potatoes has been disturbed.  The mystery preys on his mind for some time afterwards.  Awoken late one night, he is surprised to discover that the wife of a neighbour of his is busy frolicking on his potato patch with a stranger...