One major theme to the whole story is as inescapable, even doctrinal: war is hell. What makes A French Village so unique and powerful is how that theme is developed, in what region of warfare. The story begins with a German fighter plane spraying an open field with bullets for no good reason, killing two children and a teacher who happen to be on an school outing. Otherwise, what is horrifyingly hellish about the war, the Second World War, in A French Village is generated by the Nazi occupation of the place, their insane hatred for Jews and their penchant for blood when their authority is compromised. Their rule is evil, and, finally, that rule turns everyone and everything around them, an entire French Village, evil.
Left to right, it goes like this. There's Marchetti, a French cop thrust into compromise the moment the Nazis arrive, pushed to play their game despite the fact that his lover is Jewish. He murders a German soldier to insure her escape to Switzerland. Then, there's Lucienne, the school teacher who survives that strafing only to fall in love with a sweet German soldier, a relationship that, of course, ends in disaster and darkens every single moment of her life thereafter.
Marie, whose purity of motive and determination slowly brings her to leadership in the developing Resistance movement. Marie loves love and hates war, but fights with such tenacity that, when circumstances dictate choice, she even kills her husband, almost justifiably in war. But then all motives are mixed here, her husband happens to be a man she does not love.
The man in the cap is Marcel, the martyred, so committed to his Marxism that he abandons his boy, his son, after the death of his beloved wife.
The couple in the foreground spend very little time as a couple, although they are rarely apart. Hortense falls for an SS officer who, when he initially appears, seems to enjoy brutality and torture. They are an unlikely pairing--the Mayor's wife and the icon of Nazi horror. But skilled writers make it work. Her husband, a doctor appointed mayor when the German forces roll in, is a man determined to make the best moral choices in the hell created by war. But sometimes, plainly, there are none. He takes refuge from his wife's infidelity by finding love with his Jewish housekeeper, who, we discover, does not survive Auschwitz.
Raymond Schwarz is a businessman committed to making do during whatever the occupation means by continuing to provide employment for the community despite the fact that the work his company does supports the German war effort. His wife is the most truly despicable character of the series--her Parisian family has money and power enough to keep her insulated from the horrors that beset others. When she faces moral choices, she simply decides to do what fits her needs and her security. She's malevolent, as bad as the SS. Maybe worse.
There are others, not pictured, whose impact is substantial. Heinrich Mueller, of the SS, is addicted to torture and morphine because of the war wound taken in the First World War. Jules, the school's principal, finds himself almost by accident, hip-deep in the Resistance. He marries a woman, his teacher, to protect her from the repercussions of her secret liaison with a German soldier. And Gustave, the son of the dedicated communist, who grows up during the occupation, loses both parents and ends up murdering an American soldier.
You might be surprised to know that there are a dozen episodes set after the war, even though during the early seasons you can't help hoping for the invasion at Normandy. A French Village was a massive undertaking, but it has to be, at least by my judgement, one of the greatest television series in media history. Every last moment is riveting, so riveting that, as I said, I kept hoping for June 6, 1944, which, when finally it happened, didn't end the drama.
The major theme is war is hell, but what was missing in the range of powerful rolls was a Christian. To someone, like me, whose quantity of stories of the occupation have leading ladies like Corrie Ten Boom and Diet Eman, what the writers of the series didn't have include was someone whose resistance work was generated by the Nazi's evident violations of God's law, their insane hatred of Jewish people, their disregard for the sanctity of life, their hate, the absence of love.
When Diet Eman and her fiance, Hein Sietsma, began their resistance work, it started with the painful realization that God's own law would not allow them the to look past what was happening all around them in Holland. They did what they did because their God, in his word, made clear that to tolerate the evil ran counter to the love of God.
That kind of character is not part of the resistance in A French Village. There's a church all right, but it has little real power or authority. Evidence exists all over to suggest that the French Huguenots, the Protestants, were far more involved in the Resistance in France than were the Roman Catholics. Why? I'll let the sociologists and theologians offer answers to that.
What I'm saying is that some resistance fighters were motivated by something other than patriotism, ideology, or simply staying alive. After the war, heroes rise in A French Village, but none of them wore haloes--and I think I know that some underground fighters were saints in occupied Europe.
But not in A French Village. War shaped all of them all into opportunists, often because there were no other good moral choices. At it's worst, The French Village is a dark place to live for seven seasons and 70-some episodes. I wish there'd been a little more light.
But it's immensely powerful television, a masterpiece of a series.
No comments:
Post a Comment