Avis des critiques

The film does endorse the "official" version of the resistance as conducted by General De Gaulle, in whose army Melville had after all served, but its moral strength lies elsewhere. Namely in its resolute sobriety, its anti-spectacular epic that consistently frames the resistance against fascism as an act of conscience, far from stainless, and yet inevitable. Shadows, not heroes, are the protagonists of a film that never exalt them—predestined interpreters they are of a fate they did not choose.

Melville's grim, kinetic Army of Shadows, an assiduous yet epic account of the French Resistance following the exploits of one determined network, is a superb cinematic example of anti-heroic World War II revisionism.

There is little romanticism in the portrayal of their actions, no bending of history to make the Resistance seem somehow glamorous. Melville’s Army of Shadows is an austere film, shot in steely grey and blue tones, in an almost minimalist style. The languorous, late-60s pacing succeeds in creating an almost real-time sense of suspense.

Melville, who served in the French Resistance, shows the heartbreaking futility of the struggle when one is attacked from both outside and in.

Melville, known for his masterfully restrained gangster films like Le Samouraï and Le Doulos, is one of the few directors willing and able to combine strikingly blunt imagery with small details of texture and character. This visual aesthetic defines Army of Shadows on many levels, and is wonderfully on display in the opening shot of an empty Champs-de-Elysees slowly flooding with a procession of Nazi troops.

[It's] elegant, brutal, anxiety-provoking, and overwhelmingly sad... Even if you do not conclude, as so many now do, that Army of Shadows is Melville's most significant film—his signature work—and certainly one of the greatest films of the sixties, it will at least change the ways in which you make meaning of his surrounding work.

Army Of Shadows is a bracing lesson in patriotism without illusion, and the starkest, truest imaginable tribute to those who give their lives for their countries.

The experience is revelatory. Melville... crafted his masterpiece in Army of Shadows. This tale of conflicting loyalties emerges as tense, profound and eerily prescient.

The film is really at times a collection of memorable scenes held together by its high stylistic purpose. This is a cold, harrowing view of existential heroes fighting for their nation is rightly hailed as a seminal work and sticks in the mind long after its viewing.

Unlike the romantic images of freedom fighters perpetuated by the popular media, Melville’s movie... is stripped of self-congratulatory hero worship and other puffery. Army of Shadows bears some of Melville’s trademark touches, such as his film noir aesthetic and focus on the underground social and moral substrata.

The pace often bogs down during the middle sections, but picks up smartly as the climactic act of violence inexorably approaches. And it's only after the titles have rolled that the picture's full, cumulative impact really hits, and the full scale of Melville and Kessel's vision can be appreciated as an impressively intelligent and mature whole.

Army of Shadows, Melville's grey guignol of honneur and bonhomie, may lack some of its director's most overt idiosyncrasies, but it still manages to contextualize — I daresay, provincialize — the rest of his body of work. The shots of the Arc de Triomphe, occluded by uniformed Germans, that bookend the film hint that perhaps all of Melville's tales of friendship and fortitude stem from a kind of beleaguered Frenchness originating with La Résistance.