AKA “The Rays and the Shadows: A Historical Drama” from France.
Wikipedia summarized the story:
After being recognized and assaulted in 1948 , actress Corinne Luchaire, a fallen film star, recounts her memories and the story of her family that led her to her degraded situation through disastrous and immoral choices during the Occupation .
His father, the journalist Jean Luchaire , and his German friend Otto Abetz worked in the 1920s to promote Franco-German friendship . Neither of them had any attraction to Nazism at that time . At a meeting, they invited representatives of the LICA (now LICRA).
The Nazis’ rise to power in Germany in 1933 gradually made them complicit in the new regime. Otto Abetz was expelled from France in 1937, but reappeared in the summer of 1940 as Germany’s ambassador to Paris (while the French government was in Vichy ), tasked with implementing a policy of collaboration between the Third Reich and defeated France . Jean Luchaire then founded Les Nouveaux Temps , a newspaper aimed at supporting Abetz’s policies.
Meanwhile, Corinne Luchaire , an actress and model since before the war, despite her young age, tried to make a name for herself in occupied France, but suffered the consequences of the tuberculosis her father had passed on to her, which prevented her from working. She alternated between stays in sanatoriums and a life of debauchery in Paris with the countesses of the Gestapo .
In contrast, more positive figures emerge, notably that of Jean Luchaire’s father, Julien , an academic and husband of a German Jewish woman, who disavows his son in an open letter published by Le Figaro in the unoccupied zone. A number of journalists leave the editorial staff when the collaborationist shift becomes clear ; one of them, Labarrière, later dies a victim of the repression against the Resistance .
Subsidized by the German embassy, Jean Luchaire’s newspaper worked for Nazi propaganda and was openly anti-Semitic and anti-communist . He actively participated in the return of the ashes of the Aiglon .
After the Liberation, Corinne and Jean Luchaire found refuge in Sigmaringen , Germany, in 1944 with the Pétain government and Louis-Ferdinand Céline . They were arrested by American soldiers on a road in the Black Forest in May 1945. After a trial before the High Court of Justice in January 1946, Jean Luchaire was executed by firing squad that same year, and Corinne was sentenced to ten years of national disgrace. Facing widespread hostility, she lived almost in seclusion, but one day received a friendly visit from Léonide Moguy , a Jewish filmmaker from Ukraine, with whom she had worked before the war. When she asked him for news of her sister, he told her that she had died in a concentration camp, and Corinne whispered , ” Sorry, I didn’t know. ” To which Moguy replied , ” Did you try to find out ? “
The film is structured as a series of flashbacks, beginning with Corinne’s life after the war, as she records her story in voice-over on a tape recorder. During the trial of Jean and Corinne Luchaire, the prosecutor, to summarize the prosecution’s case, borrows a phrase from the writer Charles Dantzig : “The words of scoundrels arm the arms of fools.”
Nastya Golubeva Carax
Anna Prochniak
Side note since coincidentally I’ve been rewatching war documentaries: everyone should watch the old BBC 20+ part series’ on WW1 called ‘The Great War’ and WW2 documentary ‘World at War.’
On collaboration with Nazi Germany via Vichy France, I’ve always thought the most bizarre case is General Petan. A man went from literal national hero in WW1 to ultimate traitor in WW2. You could at least find some empathy for the guy if he was put in a spot of reluctant capitulation that he thought he could save lives by attempting a subversive role beneath the surface of collaboration, but he seemed to relish in the role with constant radio speeches and tried to create a cult of personality around himself in Vichy France.
Even if he were pissed at being felt left out to dry by the British or resentful to the Bolsheviks after WW1, his true colors came out in the end.
You can never underestimate anti-English feeling among the French- Petain, Laval, even the tall dead dude with the nose hated les Bifteks. And Mers-el-Kebbir (sp?) didn’t help. And Petain was also having a last laugh on the “Attack to the Max” types who had clustered around Foch during the First, particularly Gamelin and Weygand, and shunted him aside after the War.
BTW, f you ever want to gratuitously piss off Frenchmen, go to Waterloo wearing a Wellington tee (the Goya portrait) with a girlfriend wearing a Bluecher. Merveilleux!
Ah, Leos Carax’s daughter is in this. Nice tits.