In 1949, France was a broken and humiliated country. Its political and middle classes having mostly opted to throw their lot in with Hitler’s Germany, post-War France needed not just heroes but a creation myth. The myth they decided upon was that of universal resistance to German occupation and so the nation’s wartime compromises were swept under the rug where they would slowly fester until the student uprisings and general strikes of the 1960s.  Back in 1949, Jean-Pierre Melville was not the legendary figure we know today, his film noir classics Bob le Flambeur (1955) and Le Samourai (1967) were still a long way off and Melville had neither a union card or industry backing to make his first film. However, what he did have was a background as a bona fide resistance fighter and this seems to have been enough to ensure the active cooperation of the legendary resistance writer Vercors, who wrote the novel upon which this film is based.

Le Silence de la Mer opens with a pair of German soldiers turning up at a Frenchman’s door in order to requisition one of his spare rooms. For days on end, the soldiers come and go without saying a word. Eventually, the reason for this requisition is revealed when a German officer (Howard Vernon) introduces himself as their new lodger. Horrified by the presence of an invader in their homes but unwilling to stick their necks out by denying him access, the owner of the house (Jean-Marie Robain) and his niece (Nicole Stephane) react to the officer’s presence by refusing to either speak or acknowledge his presence. For months on end, the stony silence continues and yet the officer remains both polite and present. Eventually, he begins to open up to his hosts and holds forth with astonishing grace on his love of French culture and how he hopes that German’s occupation of France might benefit both countries by renewing French greatness and tempering German savagery. Such is the officer’s eloquence that his hosts very nearly crack but, because they do not, the officer takes himself off to Paris in order to enjoy the benefits of the city and have a proper conversation. Unfortunately, the conversations he has with his fellow Germans reveal that they do not share his love of French culture. Indeed, they brag about the ‘output’ they have achieved at Treblinka. Depressed and horrified, the officer puts in for a transfer to the Eastern front where he hopes to pay the price for participating in the invasion of France.

Despite being Melville’s first film, Le Silence de la Mer is devastatingly beautiful. The composition, cinematography and use of sound all work together to create the impression of an intensely silent house filled by the sound of one man’s love for the culture he is helping to destroy. While Melville would later become known for the moody minimalism of his gangster films, this film’s eerie use of light and texture is intensely stylised in a manner that is reminiscent of Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bete (1948). In fact, Cocteau and Melville would collaborate quite extensively on Melville’s second film Les Enfants Terribles (1950).

Aside from its technical brilliance, Le Silence de la Mer also offers a fascinating snapshot of a French intellectual class that was still trying to come to terms with the implications of widespread collaboration. Indeed, between the officer’s status as a ‘Good German’ and his lengthy speeches on the greatness of French culture, it is easy to read this film as an ode to the majesty of France (the film is based on a novel written by a member of the resistance) but look beyond the foreground and you find a morally ambiguous world full of silently complicity French people, bars closed to Jews and a Nazi delivering what was effectively the Petainist line that France would become greater through collaboration. While Le Silence de la Mer may lack the slow-burning outrage of Melville’s more famous indictment of French collaboration L’Armee des Ombres (1969) this is still a heroically ambiguous film from a time when France was desperate to escape all suggestion of moral ambiguity.

Extras: This DVD/Blu-ray dual format edition comes with a booklet of essays and an enlightening interview with French film scholar Ginette Vincendeau.