Line of Demarcation

Jean Seberg and Maurice Ronet

Claude Chabrol's La Ligne de démarcation (Line of Demarcation) is a World War 2 French resistance drama that I found to be better than its reputation. It is one of those rare films that gets more interesting, deeper, and incisive as it goes along. The setting is a small French village bisected by a river which also serves as the line of demarcation between Vichy France and what remained, in 1942, of the German occupied French republic. We see various refugees, spies, and escapees from German terror try to cross into Vichy France during the course of the film. Eventually. the town's populace unites to help a wounded American. The film was based on a memoir by a hero of the Resistance named Gilbert Renault who published it under nom de plume, Colonel Rémy. The memoir has been streamlined and depersonalized by Chabrol with events conflated.

The initial section of the film drags, primarily because it focuses on the film's most lifeless characters, the aristocratic Count Pierre (Maurice Ronet) and his English born wife, Mary (Jean Seberg). Pierre has just come back from a hospital where he recovered from wounds received during the German conquest of France. He is crippled and embittered, epitomizing the defeatist attitude of Petain and his cohorts. Mary, however, has turned into the Mother Courage of the Resistance. So, their bisected union represents, all too baldly, the split between Vichy and the de Gaulle led Free French. The duo doesn't seem to be getting it on, as Pierre's limp signals, all too baldly, impotence. There is little the actors can do to animate these one dimensional placards, though Ms. Seberg seems to be acting only above the neck.

Happily, the other inhabitants of the village are well cast and memorably played. No performance descends into type, but transcends. I particularly enjoyed Daniel Gélin as the village doctor and Stéphane Audran as his wife who provide the film's only erotic spark. I also thought Jean-Louis Maury was delightfully slippery as a Gestapo fiend and Reinhard Kolldehoff was suitably ambivalent as a Wehrmacht major who tries to bond with Mary and Pierre in a tip of the chapeau to La Grande Illusion. 

Collective Solidarity

Line of Demarcation was initially targeted to be a Anthony Mann project, but Mann passed and recommended Chabrol to the producer. The film shoot, larger and more commercial than he was used to, was not a happy one for the director. However, I love the way Chabrol balances the demands of juggling over a dozen characters. I think the look he gives the 1966 film is not far from Mann's noir films, but with more of a gothic melodrama feel that is perfectly apt for a film about the horrors of Nazism. After Pierre sacrifices and redeems himself in the final reel, the town barman, a socialist and class opponent of Pierre, salutes him by leading the villagers in a rendition of La Marseillaise. This display of the collective solidarity of the French Resistance is a myth, given what we now know about the extent of collaboration during this period, but all countries need their own myths and Line of Demarcation is not a bad one.