An utterly boring and mediocre movie made by a Canadian TV director. Based on a novel, and I can tell. Seems like an adaptation, not as something conceived as a film. As a film it has no spark, life, reason to exist. Every scene is meticulously edited, ends exactly when you think it will end. All the actors seem capable (except maybe for the girl who played our hero’s first wife). Our hero looks a touch like Gabriel Byrne. Plot doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. Memory and mementos, moving on with our lives after tragedy. Tragedy comes in the form of nazis. I hate nazis as much as the next guy but that doesn’t mean the movie gets off the hook for being so dull. I just wish I had watched Black Book for the third time instead.

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Sooooo bleak. Not the normal kind of resistance movie. Their struggle is necessary but hopeless. Movie opens with our main guy escaping from a camp, then having the guy who ratted on him killed. Many small triumphs and large defeats later, we end with the gang shooting one of their own then driving away as the titles tell us how each of them later got killed in the struggle.

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Hardly any non-diegetic music, superbly shot, dark and dreary but not in a tiring way, more of a matter-of-fact “this is how things are” straightforward way.

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These are not heroes in the regular movie sense of the word. Theirs is not a glorious fight… it’s hardly a fight at all, more a struggle for survival. The problem is that it would be easier to survive by living ordinary lives, by cooperating with the nazi regime, by ratting on their fellows, by doing any of a number of things they refuse to do, by giving in. The movie is about how much it can suck to be moral, to stick to your convictions. While those in the resistance who survived the war can’t have much to be proud of… unlike most residents of their country, they also can’t have much to be ashamed of. A great, great movie. Nice contrast to the portrait of resistance to nazi occupation in Black Book this year.

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