Film

La Ligne de Démarcation (1966)

Director: Claude Chabrol

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

If you believe his autobiography, Chabrol shot this picture in an alcoholic stupor, partly due to physical discomfort (on location in the mid-winter Jura countryside), but mainly because he felt no affinity with the material, a wartime resistance drama with daring escapes, heroic self-sacrifice and little moral complexity. And yet it seems a well-controlled, perfectly respectable piece, directed for its surface values and not undermined by any knowing winks at the audience (except perhaps in the scenes with leather-coated Gestapo agents Maury and Gégauff). It's a rural counterpart of L'Armée des Ombres, and although that comparison is by no means annihilating, it does point up the low intensity of Chabrol's involvement.

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