Half a century after Gaumont delivered France’s first film on Nazi collaboration with Louis Malle’s “Lacombe Lucien,” the studio finds itself at the center of a full-blown national culture war with Xavier Giannoli’s polarizing “Rays and Shadows.”
Tackling the taboo topic of French collaboration with the Nazis during the German occupation of France during WWII, the three-hour, 15-minute period drama has already drawn more than 620,000 moviegoers since its March 18 release; a remarkable performance for a period film of that length in a theatrical landscape that’s typically dominated by U.S. blockbusters, franchises and comedies. But its healthy box office performance has been matched by a fierce critical war that keeps growing nearly three weeks after its theatrical rollout and stretches across newspapers, TV, magazines and social media. The country’s biggest outlets — including Le Monde and Libération — have both published reviews and op-eds laying out the opposing camps.
Jean Dujardin, best known for his Oscar-winning turn in “The Artist,” plays Jean Luchaire, a press baron who was initially a pacifist militant in 1930s and ultimately became an influential collaborationist and propagandist, which led to him to be sentenced to death after the war. Rather than a straight biopic, the film explores the moral compromises of French high society during that era through the rise and fall of Luchaire and his daughter Corinne (Nastya Golubeva), a promising young actress who followed him into Nazi circles and was eventually stripped of her civic, political and professional rights. The feature also depicts Luchaire’s enduring friendship with Otto Abetz (August Diehl), who became the Reich ambassador in 1940.
Gaumont’s biggest budget film (in the $30-million range) since the pandemic, “Rays and Shadows” is bolstered by glossy props and a commanding performance by Dujardin. But the heated debate around the movie cuts along predictable fault lines: Is Giannoli indirectly relativizing collaboration in his attempt to bring some nuances (as suggested by the film title that refers to Victor Hugo’s collection of poems published in 1840) and humanize his protagonists who seemingly helped the Nazis out of opportunism and vanity rather than ideology?
“Rays and Shadows” adopts an immersive perspective, staying close to Luchaire and his daughter (so close that we see them coughing up blood or sputum repeatedly), yet there is no direct depiction of antisemitic violence, deportations or even visual markers like the Jewish badges.
In fact, the rare Jewish figures who appear in “Rays and Shadows” are either saved by Luchaire and his daughter or portrayed as forgiving, like Léonide Moguy, the Ukrainian-Jewish director who turned Corinne into a “French Garbo” after casting her in “Prison sans barreaux.” The film does, however, find room to depict the brutality of Resistance fighters toward collaborators with Nazis.
The harshest critique of “Rays and Shadows” came from Libération’s Luc Chessel, who called it “a disheartening biopic about the lives of scum” and “a masterclass in historical gaslighting,” accusing Giannoli of being “fascinated by its characters to the point of indulgence” and producing “a biopic of two collaborators during the Occupation that comes across as an XXL attempt at relativization, seeking to blend empathy and condemnation.”
Historian Bénédicte Vergez-Chaignon, a specialist in the Second World War, went further in an op-ed published in Le Monde, calling out the film for historical inaccuracies and arguing that its chronological “adjustments” were designed to stir sympathy for the two protagonists.
Among her objections is a key scene depicting Luchaire’s arrest by brutal Resistance members which she said is entirely fabricated. In reality, he and his daughter were arrested by American soldiers in Italy. “The Resistance is thus portrayed in its worst light,” she wrote. More broadly, she took issue with the film’s emotional strategy. “The cliché that a character is never entirely good or entirely bad does not justify forcing the audience to feel compassion,” she added.
But “Rays and Shadows” has been championed with as much passion in mainstream press. Alongside Vergez-Chaignon’s op-ed, Le Monde ran a piece by film critic Léonard Haddad who defended the film, arguing that Giannoli doesn’t make excuses for collaborators — he lets the audience figure it out for themselves.
Haddad noted that “Rays and Shadows” truly immerses audiences in the world of collaborators, rather than taking the “clinical” approach of a film like “Anatomy of a Fall,” where “each scene serves to remind us that the Nazis were Nazis in every situation — whether at the dinner table, having tea or playing knucklebones with teeth.” But a film like “Rays and Shadows” that’s “produced by Gaumont and features collaborators as protagonists,” he acknowledged, is “a much trickier matter.”
Right-wing editorialist Eugénie Bastié, who writes for Le Figaro, praised Giannoli on X for “not telling this story in black and white,” and for depicting “the gradual slide of a pacifist toward compromise, then toward collaboration, driven by weakness, ambition and greed.” Drawing a comparison with Malle’s 1974 “Lacombe Lucien” (itself deemed controversial at the time for its relatable portrayal of an ordinary young man joining a local Gestapo outpost in Southwestern France), Bastié argued the film “is neither complacent nor Manichean; it explores the roots of cowardice and indifference to evil.”
While promoting “Rays and Shadows” on French radio and TV, Giannoli fueled the controversy further by politicizing his film, drawing parallels between the antisemitism that infected the socialist circles of Luchaire and his close friend Abetz in the 1940s, and what he sees as a comparable trend within today’s radical left party La France Insoumise. On the radio show “France Inter,” he said the film “shows how antisemitism has been used as a weapon of conquest. These elements are dangerous and toxic,” taking a direct shot at party leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Giannoli also defended himself from detractors who said “Rays and Shadows” is filled with historical inaccuracies, telling Le Monde he “didn’t want to approach this subject as a historian … but as a filmmaker.”
The director did, however, consult with historians while developing the film. These three historians, Yves Pourcher, Barbara Lambauer and Cédric Méletta, even co-signed an op-ed published last week in the magazine Le Nouvel Obs, dubbing the criticism towards the film an “unofficial ‘Ideological Validation Commission.’”
“We are three historians who have followed and supported the film’s director as he gathered information and then wrote his screenplay. His passionate work led him to read almost everything related to his subject,” the historians said collectively. “Xavier Giannoli drew heavily from all of this. But his work operates on an entirely different level — that of a creator capable of constructing a story with characters and actors who draw us into the tragedy of a France that was occupied, plundered and brutalized.”
Ultimately, “Rays and Shadows,” which is produced by Olivier Delbosc, will likely remain one of the most debated French movies of the year and one that Gaumont won’t regret having made. Even if the studio won’t break even on its investment with theatrical, Giannoli’s film has a premium library value and is expected to have a robust life in ancillary markets.
Following Gaumont with “Rays and Shadows” and Studiocanal with Christophe Barratier’s “The Children of the Resistance” released in February, Pathé and TF1 Studios will next tackle France’s wartime past in Antonin Baudry’s two-part saga “De Gaulle,” and “Moulin,” a film about French Resistance hero Jean Moulin, directed by László Nemes (“Son of Saul”), respectively.
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