Moulin

Director László Nemes (Son of Saul) returns to World War II to force two real-life foes – French Resistance chief Jean Moulin and Nazi interrogator Klaus Barbie – into a grim dance macabre in this elegant and viscerally intense wartime thriller. 

As with his 2016 Holocaust drama, the Hungarian filmmaker gets up close with a man trying to hold out against inescapable terrors. Moulin, codenamed ‘Max’, is the real-life head of the French Resistance. Charged with uniting a rival network of underground cells under the nose of the Gestapo, he parachutes into occupied France in 1943 and gets to work.

Played by Gilles Lellouche, the Gauloise-puffing Moulin is straight out of a film noir. He meets his agents in cafés and coolly conveys his orders even as Nazi soldiers walk in. At a soirée, he captivates the beautiful French countess (Adèle Blanc-Sec’s Louise Bourgoin) who will unwittingly provide his cover as an interior designer. But before he can get to work wallpapering her apartment, the walls cave in. A member of the network has been picked up by the Nazis. How much has he spilled under interrogation? A covert meeting reveals the answer.

Like Jean-Pierre Melville’s Resistance masterpiece Army of Shadows, a touchstone here, Nemes and his screenwriter Olivier Demangel dip into a world where liberty is tenuous, the risks are profound and not every Frenchman is on board with the cause. The first act plays out in that paranoid register. But the meat of the film happens inside the Gestapo’s infamous Lyon HQ, Hotel Terminus, where Barbie tries to discover whether this so-called decorator is who he says he is.  

Lars Eidinger is surely a shoo-in to play a Bond villain one day

Lars Eidinger (Babylon Berlin), surely a shoo-in to play a Bond villain one day, is terrific as the coolly intelligent, unctuously psychotic Nazi, aka ‘the Butcher of Lyon’. There are stakes for him too – the Fuhrer is watching – and his slithery efforts to unmask Moulin are electric. In one terrific scene, he asks Moulin to prove his bona fides by redesigning his office as a boudoir for his French secretary: occupier, collaborator and resister all feigning civility, with a pungent undercurrent of sexual jealousy. 

If it wasn’t real, Moulin would count as close to torture porn. Ears are ripped off, men and women end up unrecognisably brutalised, and dogs are sent to hunt down prisoners. It’s strong at showing that the psychological torture – the dawning sense of hopelessness – is toughest. ‘The first night is worst,’ Moulin’s new cellmate tells him. The screams and howls that echo through the prison bear him out. 

It’s a powerful depiction of what it really takes to stand up to tyranny – a theme at this year’s Cannes, where Jean Moulin also appears in another war flick, Antonin Baudry’s La Bataille de Gaulle. Surprisingly, there’s no postscript before Moulin’s credits roll to put his story into a wider context. But there’s always the internet for that – and Marcel Ophuls’ 1988 Oscar-winning doc Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie. That one has a surprising ending, too.

Moulin premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.