Nostalgia and Nightmares

At first sight, Paris' latest hit movie seemed to be a Gallic version of That's Entertainment--a montage of vintage film clips showing France's late great stars performing on-screen and -stage, in music halls and cabarets. Youthful and jaunty, Maurice Chevalier delivered a cheerful rendition of Our Hope. Edith Piaf crooned / Danced with Love. Singer Mistinguett and Actor Fernandel garnered applause from ecstatic audiences.

The trouble was, as the film critic of the Paris daily Le Monde put it, the movie summoned up more nightmares than nostalgia. For, Chantons sous I'occupation (Let's Sing under the Occupation) was an 80-minute documentary on the good life in Paris under Nazi rule in 1940-44. Interspersed among shots of Chevalier mugging and clowning were newsreels of Wehrmacht troops marching up the Champs-Elysees, the swastika fluttering on the Eiffel Tower, and German soldiers ogling nudes at the Lido nightclub. Even grimmer was the shot of the roundup of 13,000 Jews at the Velodrome d'Hiver for deportation to Nazi death camps.

Packed Houses. The blunt juxtaposition of these joyful and agonizing images created a furor in France, where wartime collaboration with the Germans is a sensitive and often inflammatory topic. Although Let's Sing was playing in eight packed movie houses in Paris last month, the distributor was intimidated into withdrawing the film after only a nine-day showing. The reason: five masked men, styling themselves "The Revolutionary Commandos of the Christian West," trashed one of the movie houses, because they found the film "offensive to the memory of the dead." While the movie's director, former Journalist Andre Halimi, sought less timorous distributors, Let's Sing electrified audiences at three showings during the Cannes International Film Festival.

The issue raised by the documentary was whether performing in public under the German occupation constituted collaboration with the enemy. For Lawyer Albert Naud, a resistance hero who was interviewed in the film, entertaining and giving moral support to the German occupiers was as treasonable as offering them arms and food.

Dangerous, Fragmentary. There were important distinctions, Naud conceded, that the film had blurred. Piaf, among others, simply sang to make a living, and often succeeded in cheering up the French in those grim years. On the other hand, Actress Danielle Darrieux, shown boarding a train to Germany in Let's Sing, acted in German films and entertained Nazi soldiers in army camps. Even more disturbing to French audiences were shots of Maxim's restaurant, which was jammed with German officers and French businessmen, and of high-living socialites of le tout Paris attending cocktail parties given by Otto Abetz, Germany's wartime Ambassador to France.

The newspaper France-Soir blasted the movie as "dangerous, fragmentary, irresponsible, dishonest and tendentious." The monthly Le Monde Diplomatique praised it for raising "the problem of complicity between power and art." These and other strong reactions to Let's Sing pointed to France's continued morbid fascination with its troubled past--one way to avoid confronting the disquieting present.

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