The Silence of the Sea

Le silence de la mer (1949) is a French movie scripted and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. This is an unusual film about the French Resistance. It's based on a story by a Resistance fighter whose code name was Vercors.

You would expect a movie about the French Resistance to be filled with clandestine raids and destruction of railroad tracks. This isn't that movie. The Resistance in this case is silence. When the German army occupied France, army officers were often billeted in private homes.

A German officer is billeted in the home of an uncle (Jean-Marie Robain) and his niece (Nicole Stéphane). Their method of resistance is to act as if the officer is invisible. They refuse to acknowledge his presence. The officer speaks French well, but they do not answer or even look up when he speaks.

That is the plot. You'll have to see the movie to learn how it turns out in the end. Even when the German officer speaks, he's quiet and respectful. This is probably the quietest non-silent film I've ever seen.

It's always written that Melville himself was in the Resistance. However, as far as I can tell, he escaped from France and joined the Free French Army, which wasn't the same thing. He participated in the war as a soldier in Italy. The author Vercors actually was in the Resistance, and wrote the story while fighting the Germans in France.

Like Citizen Kane, this movie had an effect on many films that followed it. Melville was a pioneer. He was never formally trained in cinema. His belief was that he had seen enough movies to know how to make them. And he made this movie in a way that produced impressive results.

Melville worked a generation before the auteurs of the French New Wave. However the New Wave directors respected and copied what he did. He's been called the godfather of the New Wave.

Melville made this movie on a shoestring budget, with scraps of film and no special lighting. His crew fit into a van--director, cinematographer, sound technician, and the three leading actors.

This movie worked well on the small screen. (We bought the Criterion Collection DVD, which included specials that revealed more about Melville and his style of filmmaking.)

It's hard to rate Le silence de la mer, because it's so different from other movies--even French movies about the Resistance. The film has a strong IMDb rating of 7.6, which I think is correct. I rated it 8.