Rating: 9.5 / 10

"You’d think, to hear some people talk,

That lads go West with sobs and curses,

And sullen faces white as chalk,

Hankering for wreaths and tombs and hearses.

But they’ve been taught the way to do it

Like Christian soldiers; not with haste

And shuddering groans; but passing through it

With due regard for decent taste." — Siegfried Sassoon, How to Die (1918)

War, to me, had always been intriguing as I reiterate through questioning its existence and its purpose while continuing to look into the dehumanization that the cyclical hell of history has brought upon mankind. Dehumanization, on one hand, constitutes the treatment of troops as mere pawns in a blood-smeared checkerboard, while on the other, it reeks of the decrepit morals of said pawns like a crumbling house of cards as they were trained to accept their designations as cogs in the global wheel of organised pandemonium and not living, thinking, feeling beings in a functional society.

Melville's Army of Shadows, despite being a major overhaul of the base literature, is the very sombre take on warfare that exposes the latter form of mass slaughtering of the inner humanity through a small sample set of fringe participants. The French Resistance is outnumbered and outgunned and in spite of the fullest efforts of the crew, members land themselves in unexpected predicaments due to no fault of their own. The visual aesthetic in pastel palettes of muted cobalt, cyan and teal accompanied by foggy, bleak and quiet streets manifest the seeping doubts and internal turmoil eroding the crew bit by bit, mistrust turns corrosive and is complemented by executions based on probabilistic guessing. No decisions are objectively clear, no member can be deemed objectively correct.

Having been a fighter in the French Resistance himself and clearly not interested in the combative aspects of the war or of the Resistance, Melville paints the picture of the human mind, a depiction of its solemn misery in the midst of chaos. Such intentions can be best comprehended in the scene where Philippe Gerbier is in London in the midst of a ball — soldiers dancing away with their ladies, straight out of Byron's "The Eve of Waterloo". However, there is neither hopeful light nor glory in this; dust falls at the impact of bombs dropping in the vicinity, and unsure of what to do, mirroring the central theme of moral uncertainty in the film, Gerbier is seen to be genuinely scared for the first time in the film. British men continue to dance away. This is normal, this too shall pass.

Concluding with a hastily carried out execution of a supposedly compromised agent based on a plausible "theory", Melville deconstructs the fatality of war through intimately personal subjects. It's not people getting squashed like ants in a siege, it is the banality of war-induced chaos striking the characters we know, the reward for their courage, determination and moral fortitude is as bleak as choosing not to run in the race against their failure and their own mortality.

A low-key suspenseful, gritty masterpiece.