Many remember, some have forgotten--or rather, have chosen to forget. Messieurs Danton and Dionnet no longer recall what happened when a student suddenly disappeared or his parents were denounced. It is all very vague. "What of the commemorative plaque on the school wall?" Ophuls asks. "Did you know those students?" That's for the '14-'18 war, they think. The camera turns to the list of students killed in World War II. Marcel Vendier, the pharmacist, admits he never before talked of the war with his children because he was too busy making a living.
Some have forgotten more than the experience. Helmuth Tausend still believes that Alsace is part of Germany. Conte de Chambrun maintains that his father-in-law, Pierre Laval, was the savior of France. While Premier of unoccupied France, Laval once headlined the newspaper he owned: "Laval Wants a German Victory." One of the Resistance fighters still believes that his Communist compatriots fought because their allegiance was to Russia.
Emile Couladon, Colonel "Gaspar", relatesnow customers will come into his store and claim to have been in the Resistance. As local head of the Resistance, Couladon knows they are deluding themselves, but what the hell, and challenging them would hurt business. Some of the citizens of Clermont-Ferrand said that they saw no Germans in their town in 1942. There were.
Some forget almost immediately. Maurice Chevalier is shown collaborating, then denying all in 1946. In general the liberated French avenged themselves on the scapegoats they created, especially women who had been with German soldiers. Yet overwhelmingly they had been apathetic to the cause of the Resistance. Madame Solange's story of her persecution in the first weeks after the Liberation serves as an awful reminder of human cruelty's adaptability. Newsreels show the French applauding on one side then three years later the other--with equal vehemence.
IV
WHILE THE SORROW'S over-all portrait of the French is bleak, many people are worthy of respect. Some are heroes. Counter to the accepted wisdom, the film suggests that these are not great men, but those who knew they must do something and did. Colonel "Gaspar" explains that he didn't like the Germans eating French beef when he had none, Emmanuel D' Astier de la Vigerie merely that he had to do something, and the same with the Grave brothers. Denis Rake, an English secret agent, very simply states that as a homosexual he wanted to prove that he could do what other men were supposed to do. "I really don't know...It was my duty if I could help, that's all."
The men of the Resistance refer to themselves as black sheep, outlaws. Their neighbors treated them as such, the Graves claim. They were dismissed as terrorists, then, when the Liberation came, as profiteers. D'Asteir de la Vigerie cherishes it as the one time he lived in a classless society because they were all outside society. Grave recalls that at the first gathering of what became the Resistance, they sang "The Internationale." "We had to sing something, and the Petainists had "The Marseillaise."
The heroes of The Sorrow share a sense of personal fallibility. They understand that the Occupation was a fall from human dignity, and accept the part they played. D'Astier de la Vigerie attributes his current serenity to his constant fear during the war. Christian de la Maziere, a former French fascist, is one of the most dignified men in the film because he does not deny the truth about himself. The hero, if one has to be named, is Mendes-France, who suffered, survived, and remained human. In this history there are not great men so much as there are honest ones.
V
THE DOCUMENTARY'S only villain is Premier Pierre Laval. His personal behavior casts him as such in the film's context of what is ugliest about the French: their anti-Semitism. They embraced the ideology of race purity using stricter criteria than the Nuremberg laws. Newspapers blamed France's defeat on "foreign elements." Doctors used the Gestapo to rid themselves of Jewish competitors. In the cinemas films played like The Jew Suss, which warned against interbreeding. Especially distressing is a newsreel of the memorialization of France's first anti-Semitic "authority" coupled with views of a touring exhibit on how to identify Jews.
Laval's part in this tragedy is recounted by the biologist Dr. Claude Levy. The Gestapo requested a round-up of French Jews over sixteen, and in their enthusiasm the French gendarmes collected them all. The Nazis hadn't expected the children, so kept them in Paris while their parents were sent off to French concentration camps. While the bureaucracy made up its mind, Pastor Bougner appealed to Laval to evacuate the children. "It's of no importance," Laval replied. "I am practicing prophylaxis." Laval's insistence is documented by a telegram he sent. Did any of the children come back. Dr. Levy is asked.
"None of the children returned."
VI
DEFINITION BY ANALOGY: Out of all the years that Walter Kronkite's television program The Twentieth Century chronicled the Great War, I remember only one scene. From that mass of battle strategies, grand designs, and diagrams all that remains is this: In a Nazi newsreel of the Czech occupation, as the Fuhrer's motorcade swept through masses of dutifully saluting civilians, one woman, one woman in the crowd, broke down and turned away and cried. Of the Vietnam War I think of two pictures, one of an American soldier cradling his terrified comrade in his arms, the other of a naked screaming Vietnamese child, running towards the camera, burning from napalm. And now with a clarity that is almost unendurable, Marcel Ophuls has captured through memory a portrait of war and callousness and humanity at its worst.
The Sorrow and the Pity represents the darkest side of human experience. It is not the self-aggrandizing view of the world to which Kissinger's biography of Metternich. The Meaning of History, lays claim. Nor does it depend on arrows sweeping across a map or countries drenched in different intensities of red. It does not depend on Great Men--Metternichs or Kissingers. It is people, collectively and as individual human beings. Their hopes. Their crimes. Their sorrows. The story of this one French town during this one particular nightmare pulses more deeply than the matter-of-fact recollections of pain and endurance its citizens tell. It reminds those who will listen of the atrocities committed in the name of the Noble Cause, that few will resist and most will acquiesce, then forget.