La Silence de la Mer

La Silence de la Mer, or The Silence of the Sea, was Jean-Pierre Melville's first feature, released in 1949. It was based on a book that was published illegally during the Nazi occupation of Paris. The film, coming only four years after the end of the war, is a fair but also caustic look at the differences between the French and Germans. It's kind of like "Germans Are From Mars, French Are From Venus."

An uncle and his niece, (Jean-Marie Robain and Nicole Stephane) are forced by the Nazis to quarter a soldier in there house. He turns out to be Howard Vernon, an articulate lover of French culture. But Robain and Stephane never speak to him. Vernon doesn't seem to be bothered by this, and goes on and on while Stephane tends to her knitting and Robain to his pipe. They may be punishing Vernon, but he accepts it.

As a Frenchman who fought for the Resistance, Melville is somewhat sympathetic to Vernon but not to the entire German population. Vernon flashes back to a time when he had a girlfriend. They are sitting out in a meadow, and she says that nature is so beautiful. Then she is bitten by a mosquito and tears its legs off, one by one. In another scene, Vernon tells the silent couple the story of Beauty and the Beast, with the clear implication that the Beauty is France and the Beast is Germany.

Much of the film is a chamber drama with just the three characters. Later it will open up to include Nazis discussing how concentration camps are increasing their death rates (Melville zooms in on a portrait of Hitler during this conversation). Vernon is chided for his Francophilia. The other officers say that France and French culture must be destroyed.

So La Silence de la Mer is a very angry film, with Melville, understandably, still feeling the effects of the occupation. I expect those feelings never went away.