Suite Française | Little White Lies

Suite Française

12 Mar 2015 / Released: 13 Mar 2015

Two people, a man and a woman, standing close together and appearing to have an intimate conversation.
Two people, a man and a woman, standing close together and appearing to have an intimate conversation.
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Anticipation.

Saul Dibb returns after 2008's decent Keira Knightley vehicle, The Duchess.

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Enjoyment.

Trashier than perhaps it thinks it is.

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In Retrospect.

Everyone involved has been better elsewhere.

Nazi occu­pa­tion in the French coun­try­side leads to for­bid­den love in this so-so lit­er­ary adaptation.

Nazis, eh? You can’t live with em… British direc­tor Saul Dibb appears to have sev­ered all ties with the urban, con­tem­po­rary fic­tion of his for­ma­tive years (cf Bul­let Boy) in a bid to posi­tion him­self as mod­ern cinema’s one-stop replace­ment for Mer­chant-Ivory. The prob­lem with this equa­tion is that Mer­chant-Ivory often brought pas­sion, verve and a mea­sure of orig­i­nal­i­ty to their sin­gu­lar brand of lit­er­ary pres­tige extrav­a­gan­za, where on the evi­dence of the under­pow­ered Suite Française, Dibb still has some way yet to go.

Which is a shame, as the source mate­r­i­al is as juicy and entrenched in roman­tic lore as they come. It’s an adap­ta­tion of a series of sto­ries by one Irène Némirovsky who died in Auschwitz before her man­u­scripts were com­plet­ed (rough plot out­lines remained) and, sub­se­quent­ly, they became lost arte­facts. The note­books resur­faced in 1998, and the result­ing sal­vaged nov­el swift­ly took its place among the annals of mod­ern greats.

Dibb’s film cen­tres on tran­si­tion­al activ­i­ties in the town of Bussy cir­ca 1940 as Ger­man troops rolled their tanks into France as part and par­cel of occu­pa­tion duties. Well-to-do, hard-nosed dowa­ger, Madame Angel­li­er (Kristin Scott-Thomas, who else?) and her mousy, musi­cal­ly-inclined daugh­ter-in-law, Lucille (Michelle Williams), do their best to mud­dle on as the Madame’s son (and Lucille’s hus­band), Gas­ton, is out fight­ing for his country.

Trou­ble is most def­i­nite­ly a‑brewing, and that’s when the Sun­day wor­ship is inter­rupt­ed by the sound of stomp­ing jack­boots. The next thing the pair know, they’ve been sad­dled with dash­ing, immac­u­late­ly-coiffed Nazi lieu­tenant, Bruno (Matthias Schoe­naerts), as an enforced house­guest. Yet Bruno turns out to be a self-loathing Nazi, a gen­tle­man, a paragon of decen­cy. He’s also quite handy on the ivories.

This vari­ety of benign Nazi comes from a rich cin­e­mat­ic lin­eage, stretch­ing back to Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Silence de la Mer via Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, both films explor­ing the notion of how a nation­al polit­i­cal creed can inter­rupt a person’s basic sense of right and wrong. Suite Française touch­es, very gen­tly, on that con­cept, but its maudlin the­atrics, sin­gle-serv­ing sup­port­ing char­ac­ters and hand­i­ly sign-post­ed plot pro­gres­sions means that it doesn’t come close to emu­lat­ing the hair-trig­ger ten­sion of the for­mer and the ful­some and intri­cate melo­dra­ma of the latter.

Dibb clear­ly knows what he’s deal­ing with in this mate­r­i­al, but is too behold­en to unnec­es­sary pithi­ness and blunt dia­logue exchanges which sees char­ac­ters appear to be talk­ing direct­ly to an audi­ence rather than one anoth­er. No nuance is left to chance, no moment con­sid­ered wor­thy of a treat­ment which might result in even mild ambi­gu­i­ty. There’s a sin­gle Jew­ish char­ac­ter in the film who feels like she’s been wheeled in as a sac­ri­fi­cial lamb, while Mar­got Robbie’s frumped-up farm hand seems to have no place in the sto­ry at all.

Per­haps the film’s great­est fail­ing, how­ev­er, is that it could per­haps be accused of seri­ous­ly under­selling the hor­rors of the Ger­man occu­pa­tion. The Nazi char­ac­ters come across as so stan­dard­ised and arche­typ­al, their actions so boor­ish and obvi­ous, more like action movie hench­men than real peo­ple, that you’d have to be descend­ing in and out of a nar­colep­tic tor­por not to guess exact­ly how thing plays out.

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