“Every man on earth has two sides: good and evil. To blame everything is to understand nothing.” This excerpt from Victor Hugo’s collection of poems, Rays and Shadows [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] – which lends its title to Xanier Giannoli’s new film, released in French cinemas by Gaumont on 18 March – perfectly sums up the director’s ambition. Giannoli tackles a highly sensitive subject - one that disturbingly resonates with contemporary events - by casting an “unbiased and uncompromising gaze” on the gradual descent into the darkest depths of collaboration between the German occupiers and a press magnate along with his actress daughter during the Second World War.

A story inspired by real-life events involving Jean and Corinne Luchaire (the former having been shot in 1946, the latter having been sentenced to ten years of national disgrace), which the director (who co-wrote the screenplay with Jacques Fieschi) explores with a cinematic mastery worthy of praise, as the challenge of bringing such complex characters to light, respecting historical truths and crafting the whole into a spectacular film was a very perilous one. The film treads a fine line, as the aim was neither to whitewash nor to further demonise the protagonists, but to capture all the nuances of two lives that had veered towards the dark side, laying them bare by recounting how they came to be in that position.

“Take a good look at them, they’re all going to be hanged”, “To whom must you answer for all this? – To my conscience.” Before reaching the darkest hours of collaboration (which would end in the shipwreck of fugitives in exile in Sigmaringen), the story, recounted in 1948 by an utterly devastated Corinne Luchaire (the breakthrough newcomer Nastya Golubeva Carax), describes its origins: the meeting and friendship that blossomed in the late 1920s within pacifist circles between Jean Luchaire (an excellent Jean Dujardin in a highly complex role), who ran the newspaper Notre Temps, and Professor Otto Abetz (a solid August Diehl), who would become the Reich’s ambassador to Paris in 1940. Little by little, through an indistinguishable mix of careerism, venality, favours and a desire to belong to the highest political, economic and social echelons of power, Jean drifts, once war breaks out, towards compromise with the enemy; whilst the very young Corinne, who follows her father and the trend, seeking to numb herself without asking questions, becomes a fashionable actress after her debut in Prison sans barreaux (1938). But a veritable descent into hell lies ahead, for their desire to get drunk and “gorge themselves on the grand feast offered by the Germans” will cost them dearly.

By bringing the ghosts of collaboration back into the light, Xavier Giannoli crafts an edifying epic in which journalists, artists, politicians, fanatics, opportunists, resistance fighters and others all cross paths. A film of exceptional richness (3 hours and 15 minutes of gripping viewing) that the filmmaker directs with masterful skill, injecting a dose of melodrama (the two protagonists have tuberculosis, a bloody metaphor for the spiritual evil that gnaws at them) and by navigating without prejudice the murky world of corruption where “the words of scoundrels arm the fools” and where “shameful morality” feeds “the most abject thoughts”.

Rays and Shadows was produced by Curiosa Films, Waiting For Cinema and Gaumont, and co-produced by France 3 Cinéma and Umedia. Gaumont handles international sales.