THE STORY – 1943. The Nazis occupy Belgium and have turned the national daily Le Soir into their propaganda tool. With 1918 Armistice Day commemorations forbidden, a group of Resistance fighters comes up with a wild idea: what if, to lift the spirits of the Belgian people, they could print a fake edition of Le Soir? Same paper, same nameplate, same format, but packed with articles mocking the occupier. A true story. A fake newspaper. The world’s first media hack.
THE CAST – Arieh Worthalter, Mélanie Thierry, Karim Leklou, Mara Taquin, Bouli Lanners, Julien Frison & François Damiens
THE TEAM – Michaël R. Roskam (Director/Writer) & Bernard Falaise (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 133 Minutes
You can’t open a WWII movie without an air raid siren, and “Le Faux Soir” welcomes its audience with that sound. It’s 1943, Belgium is occupied, and Le Soir, the Belgian daily newspaper, has lost its voice, defiled with Nazi propaganda. What’s on the newsstands isn’t Le Soir anymore. One character says as much, marveling that anyone believes the headlines; another shrugs him off. It doesn’t matter if it’s true. It just has to sell.
That cynicism is exactly what Marc (Arieh Worthalter) can’t stomach, and he’s the reason this film works so well. He’s genuinely, cuttingly funny, which is rarer than it should be in a genre this consistently grim. Early on, he prints a flyer so gleefully profane – calling Nazis “dung dung ducks” – that it reads like schoolyard mockery. But his words hold power, and he slips it into library books, betting something this small might seed something bigger. His girlfriend Geraldine (Mara Taquin) wants him bored and alive. He calls that cowardice. Better a coward than “a dead hero,” she tells him. It’s an exchange where you feel exactly what headspace he’s coming from: a man who has decided doing nothing is its own kind of death.
Soon, Marc is invited into the Resistance through drawing lessons that turn out to be a front. He gets a codename, and you see his role take shape in the Independence Front; it all moves briskly, and the dialogue stays sharp even as the stakes rise. There are many humorous conversations – like the bit about why Hitler’s mustache looks the way it does – that shouldn’t work tonally in a film about occupation, but they do. And it never lets humor become a cushion for the real danger outside. A scene where two Nazis pull a Jewish girl from Geraldine’s classroom, the head nun telling her to be “vigilant” because Jews hide in plain sight, sits a few scenes from a joke. That tonal whiplash oddly works and makes you even more invested in the narrative.
The film’s title refers to the Resistance’s main plan: to print their own edition of Le Soir, using the real paper’s name, format, and delivery routes so Belgians would buy the fake, believing it was the collaborationist original, only to find the truth of the war instead. It’s a heist movie wearing a war uniform. There’s a scene with a map tracing the papers’ route from press to newsstand, discussed with the same clipped precision of a crew planning to rob an armored truck. The operation plays like a robbery, right down to timing the drop so the fake edition beats the real one to the stands without arriving too early. One wrong move, everyone’s dead. The film lets you feel those stakes.
It also knows how to use its score, which has an offbeat, almost musical quality. There’s a genius bit where Françoise (Mélanie Thierry), the boss of the operation, reads articles aloud and the beat of the score picks up her cadence exactly. Another scene has a character’s rant against the Nazis built into something with the rhythm of a showstopper, like a musical without singing. It’s a strange, specific choice for a WWII film, and one of the things that keeps “Le Faux Soir” from settling into the dourness this genre usually can’t, understandably, escape. There’s real joie de vivre running under the danger here, and it’s rare enough in this kind of story that it’s worth naming as an achievement on its own.
Where the film runs into trouble is scale. Many players are involved, and the film can’t give most of them an interior life. Many characters exist almost entirely as their function in the plan, not as people with lives before or after. The closest the film comes to acknowledging this is a closing note explaining who lived, who died, and what it cost. That’s a real gap, and it compounds a structural problem. Because this is a true story, the film is committed to showing every setback the operation hit. That means it circles back through the same beats many times as a new obstacle, a scramble to solve it, and a return to planning happen often enough that momentum drains out of the middle stretch. At over two hours, it earns some of that length by showing the labor of pulling this off, but it also drags in a way a tighter cut might have solved without losing what makes the story worth telling. What makes “Le Faux Soir” work is its insistence that the Nazis could take everything from these people except their sense of humor, and that humor itself, along with the power of the truth, becomes the resistance.
