Resistance: The Story of Marcel Marceau, the Mime Who Fought the Nazis
Marcel Marceau, an 18-year-old mime (played by a 37-year-old Jesse Eisenberg) from Strasbourg, a city on the border between France and the Third Reich. He pursues his dream of becoming a great artist, despite the disapproval of his butcher father, and, according to his brother, thinks only of himself. However, his relative’s claims soon prove false: first, Marcel begins helping Jewish children evacuated from Germany (they become the first audience to truly appreciate his pantomimes), and then, after the Nazi invasion, he joins the Resistance to help smuggle the children to safety in Switzerland.
The story of Marcel Marceau – the legendary mime who helped the French Resistance save Jewish children during World War II – is almost too good to be true. If someone were to invent such a plot, it would be dismissively labeled sentimental, or even accused of being banal. The truth is all on the surface: the theme of the relationship between art and war, an uplifting parable about how artistic talent can be used to fight a cannibalistic totalitarian regime without resorting to violence. But what can you do? Sometimes real life (with a sprinkling of artistic license, of course) turns out to be more sentimental than any fiction.
From Stage to Resistance: Marceau’s Untold Story
It’s strange that Marceau’s biography has only now made it to the big screen – it seems like a story that a director like Spielberg could have adapted a couple of decades ago. Instead, the film was directed by Jonathan Jakubowicz, a little-known Venezuelan director for whom “Resistance” is the first notable project outside of South America. And, unfortunately, his directorial style (or rather, lack thereof) is the weakest link in the film. Jakubowicz directs like a confident craftsman, but he lacks artistic boldness. For a film about Marceau, who broke new ground in the art of mime, “Resistance” is too formulaic and generic. For a film about a man who abandoned speech in his art (because after World War II he could no longer trust words), the film talks too much.
Unexplored Depths: Missed Opportunities in “Resistance”
Of course, it’s wrong to criticize a work for what it lacks. But “Resistance” invites such a reverse analysis – there are too many interesting decisions that remain mere hints, never fully developed. For example, at one point, the theme of illusion as a way to cope with trauma emerges: Marceau, caricaturing Hitler, entertains the children and teaches them how to hide from the Nazis. It’s hard not to think of “Jojo Rabbit” or “Life is Beautiful” – other films that explored the Holocaust experience with an uncharacteristic tragicomic tone. But there are no more such scenes in “Resistance.” This episode remains a single flash against the backdrop of a pompous, serious drama.
Moreover, the plot about how Marceau’s creative method helps him save children is forgotten somewhere in the middle – the film suddenly turns into a biography of the French Resistance, and the legendary mime becomes just one of many unremarkable heroes (in this sense, the title of the film is curious, as it also equates Marceau with other members of the movement). The authors do a very strange thing here: they change reality to suit the needs of the film and send Marceau to the Lyon partisans, with whom he was only indirectly connected in reality. Apparently, this is to bring him face to face with Klaus Barbie – a real SS officer known for his cruelty (in reality, the mime hardly saw him). But beyond one scene, where Marceau has to remember his acting talent to save the children, this clash of two historical figures serves no particular purpose. Moreover, for the sake of this strange assumption, the filmmakers sacrificed real, much more colorful stories from the artist’s life: for example, the one where he deceived border guards by transforming into different characters and making them think that the same person was not passing by them.
A Flawed but Meaningful Narrative
The portrayal of Barbie himself is also ambiguous. In some scenes, he is shown as a multifaceted personality, in whom a cruel maniac-sadist and a loving father can coexist (according to Jakubowicz, this versatility makes the antagonist even more terrifying – because we understand that such atrocities are possible for an ordinary person). In others, he suddenly turns into a Bond villain who plays the piano right in the middle of executing prisoners. “Resistance” generally lacks tonal and creative integrity, the film seems to strive to be extraordinary, but stops halfway and falls into truisms. One exception is the interesting narrative ring: the film begins and ends with a speech by General Patton, whom Marceau actually met at the end of World War II. In it, the film postulates its main truth: military heroism is meaningless without the heroism of ordinary people, killing a hundred enemies is not worth a single life saved.
The film’s creative inconsistency is best reflected in a phrase from an interview with director Jonathan Jakubowicz: in it, he admits that he did not want to make the film visually similar to other works about the Holocaust, and instead was inspired by the paintings of Marc Chagall. So: only a couple of scenes in “Resistance” are unusually shot, where Marceau experiences disorientation – first in a shelter for Jewish children, later on the streets of Lyon – and the camera captures his subjective sensations using a space-distorting wide-angle lens. Otherwise, the film looks exactly as its director did not want it to. Like a good, quite skillful, but still standard drama about the Holocaust.