László Nemes delivers a try-hard biopic of French Resistance leader Jean Moulin that values style and violence over emotion and original perspective.
The speed at which Academy-lauded Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes has traversed the spectrum of radical cinematic saviour to unrepentant hack has been surprisingly fast. His 2015 film Son of Saul announced the arrival of a major new talent, one with an unflinching view of history’s rolling continuum and the experiential potential of careful image-making. His new film Moulin is drab, anonymous prestige slop, the type of pay-for-play historical drama that you make for no other reason than to have your pool retiled.
Just as he cribbed from Claude Lanzmann, director of the monumental Shoah, for Son of Saul, he turns his attention now to the French maestro Marcel Ophuls, whose works includes the extraordinary Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, and his masterpiece on the collaborationist Vichy government during World War Two, The Sorrow and the Pity. In shades of slick TV-movie gloss, this new film tells of the dashing French Resistance leader Jean Moulin (Gilles Lellouche) and how he and his cohorts came a‑cropper when their cover was blown during a secret meeting at a rural Lyonnaise doctor’s surgery.
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Nemes ladles on the high style in a way that feels like he’s making up for lack of substance elsewhere, with gaudy smoke effects, lots of soft-focus, aggressive back lighting and layered sound design calibrated to ensure a really bad time. Soon, Moulin (under his codename Jacques Martel), is drawn into the jackbooted and throbbing head-vein’d sphere of famed Nazi psychopath Klaus Barbie (Lars Eidinger), and their dance of intellects putters out swiftly before the film shifts to its inevitable orgy of human suffering.
The thing about this film that is wholly unedifying is that it is entirely stripped of perspective beyond the accepted fact that Moulin is the good guy and Barbie is the monster. There is no pleasure to be had from a work which sets its timer and forces you to watch a clock tick towards horrific violence – it’s like a handsome, Cinema du Papa riff on a New French Extremity film, and not in a good way. There are a few digressions on the way, a couple of flowery speeches delivered by Barbie which suggest that he was fully aware of his place in history. Yet the story has a dirge-like momentum to its unravelling that no flashy camera movements or scenery-chewing performance can deflect from.
Sure, you could be justified in waving through a pair of committed performances from Lellouch and Edinger, even though they’re ramped up to almost caricatured-levels of the hero/villain dichotomy. Yet the drabness of Olivier Demangel’s screenplay sees him pack in scads of pernickety historical detail while omitting to give us a reason why we’d want to actually witness this well-documented showdown once again. And any intellectual posturing on the part of Nemes is shut down with a laughable closing shot which infers that Moulin’s stoic reserve under the most extreme pressure is what eventually put a definitive stop the mechanised murder of countless millions at the hands of the Nazis.
