THE STORY – August 1942. Amid the occupation, the Vichy government organizes a mass round-up of foreign Jews. Gilbert Lesage, a young civil servant at the Service Social des Étrangers, is tasked with setting up a screening commission to rule on the fate of the arrested Jews, while Father Alexandre Glasberg, a committed humanitarian, maneuvers to save them. Caught between Vichy’s bureaucracy and mutual-support networks, they will have to join forces to defy the machinery of the State and risk the unthinkable to wrench lives from the grim fate that awaits them.
THE CAST – Daniel Auteuil, Antoine Reinartz, Grégory Gadebois, Alicia Dadoun & Victor Bonnel
THE TEAM – Daniel Auteuil (Director/Writer) & Camille Lugan (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 100 Minutes
Not only is cinema bursting with films set during World War II, but more than one has premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival alone. Director Daniel Auteuil’s “When the Night Falls” depicts a singular event in Nazi-occupied France that (at least to this American viewer) has been mostly overshadowed by the many other stories of a larger scale from the time period. But obviously, it’s an event worthy of being remembered in order to both commemorate the heroes and ensure that, through the retelling, humanity can avoid such an event happening again. Unfortunately, Auteuil’s realization of this chapter in history doesn’t make for a compelling cinematic interpretation, instead feeling somehow simultaneously rushed and languorous.
Taking place in 1942 Lyon, the film opens with a sequence that, despite being silent, quivers with inherent dread. A black car makes its way through a camp of abandoned barracks, winding like a snake through the roads between the large buildings. Here, we get our first glimpse of the film’s impressive art direction, with the buildings immediately appearing foreboding. It’s the ideal scene-setting for the film that follows, though it doesn’t exactly set realistic expectations for its mood. Because once characters start speaking quickly, the screenplay’s clinical style immediately makes the film feel cold and detached. This may well be intentional, to mirror the administrative dealings that will follow, but it’s a tough welcome for the audience. Tellingly, the film’s other noteworthy sequence similarly follows a car as it tours the now-occupied barracks in a long take, with no music or dialogue, and only a terrifying siren for a soundtrack.
Early on, the film introduces its main hero, Gilbert Lesage (Antoine Reinartz, who delivers a far less memorable performance here than he does as the sassy lawyer in “Anatomy of a Fall”). He’s a civil servant who volunteers to put together and head a commission charged with determining what should be done with the area’s recently rounded-up Jewish population. The prisoners have been confined to the barracks seen in the opening sequence, and Lesage’s task force must go through them one by one, deciding who should be exempt from deportation out of the Vichy free zone. Some of his notable selected committee members include Father Abbé Glasberg (played by Auteuil himself, delivering the film’s best performance) and Lili Tager (a powerfully focused Luàna Bajrami).
A good deal of the film consists of scenes discussing the formation of the committee and their actual meetings, in which they sort through the prisoners. Lesage, Glasberg, and Tager all do their best, to varying degrees of success and at differing times, to exempt as many as possible, despite opposition from the more subservient members. These scenes are filled with overly administrative dialogue, smartly emphasizing the evil absurdity of a bureaucratic process being used to hasten a genocide. As one character tells another, “This isn’t about fairness, it’s about efficiency.” Eventually, the conspirators find a way to save a wide swath of the population from deportation. Still, once this secret method is revealed, the film’s pace suddenly accelerates, breezing through this part of the story, which is essentially the reason the film was made in the first place. It’s an odd choice that makes the whole thing feel incomplete.
As a visual storyteller, Auteuil makes flashy choices that don’t help the film to clearly tell its story. He leans on camera effects like extreme close-ups and focus shifts, which mostly just distract. In fact, his overreliance on altering the camera’s focus, when paired with the film’s dark lighting, only serves to obscure the image. In his choice of photography, Auteuil took the film’s title too literally.
“When the Night Falls” is an excellent example of a film that tells a worthy story, but in a manner not befitting its own importance. The facts of the historic event are interesting; the execution itself isn’t. Instead, Auteuil seems content to swing wildly between giving his characters abundant, excessively rigid dialogue and simply watching them move in solitary silence from location to location. The film’s languid energy reflects the slow decision-making that makes up most of the story’s substance, but the process itself isn’t depicted in a way that holds viewers’ attention. It’s telling that the film’s two best sequences don’t feature any characters at all, focusing on a strictly defined tone that does more work to convey the dread and danger of the film’s happenings than any other elements of the script.
