Charlotte Gray

I'm a sucker for French resistance pictures. After all, as Woody Allen said in Annie Hall, "They were so brave, having to listen to Maurice Chevalier sing." There is no Maurice Chevalier in Charlotte Gray, but there is a lot to recognize, such as rainy, windswept French landscapes, old houses, menacing Gestapo, and bread and cheese. And, at the end, the movie finally wakes up.

Cate Blanchett is our heroine, a Scottish woman who is fluent in French and eager to help her country in any way during the war against the Huns. She is recruited and undergoes a kind of spy boot camp, where she learns to shoot a gun and that France is divided into two zones, the Nazi-controlled north, and Vichy south, where France is free but collaborating with the enemy. She is sent to a small town with a fake identity to help the cause.

This is complicated at first by her attachment to a British flier who has been lost over France. Blanchett, in meeting with a courier, makes a slip that costs the woman her life. She will then be stashed in a colleague's father's house. He is Billy Crudup, fiercely communist and with cheekbones to die for, and the father is the reliably excellent Michael Gambon, a crusty old bird who gets sentimental when he cares for two Jewish children.

The film, directed by Gillian Armstrong, moves quietly at a snail's pace until the end, when the Nazi noose forms tight. Someone betrays them, and Gambon is taken away, since his grandparents were Jewish.

The whole thing is very tasteful and decorous. Blanchett, who is in almost every scene, is photographed luminously. The very first shot is a close-up of her face, and in some ways that's what the movie is about, a beautiful woman's face, not much else.