Successful revolutions and liberation movements that succeed often suffer from an interesting syndrome. Several weeks, months, years after the events, there are more and more “heroes” claiming deeds of bravery. In Romanian, the proverb that characterizes this syndrome is ‘Many heroes show up after the war’ with the updated humorous version ‘There were a few, but many more have remained’. France is a country where the phenomenon has been widespread after World War II. Post factum heroes who claimed that they were enrolled in the Resistance appeared not only amog those who stood on the fences, such as the hero of Jacques Audiard‘s film “Un héros très discret” (the English title is ‘A Self-Made Hero‘), but also from the ranks of collaborators trying to escape responsibility and harsh, sometimes capital punishments, dictated by the rapid justice of the winners in the years immediately after the war.
Albert Dehousse (Mathieu Kassovitz ), the hero of the movie, is raised by his mother having never know his father, a fallen soldier in WWI. As lone child of a widow he is spared the front, as a fresh married son-in-law he succeeds to avoid also being sent to forced work in Germany. He is a hesitant and not very self-confident young man, but has some qualities – a rich imagination, a good memory, a capacity to understand what to say and how to act in order to please other people. Inventing a past that is not his own seems to be the way to survive and succeed in the troubled times at the end of WWII. He has some good background in the family (he discovers that his father was not the hero his mother claimed him to be to get a pension) and he meets a couple of people who teach him the art of masquerading used by them for better causes. Quite soon, he acquires a hero’s past, advances on the social scale, gets an officer position, and is sent as a commander in occupied Germany. All that was possible for ex-Resistants in France immediately after the war. Maybe he succeeds better than expected, as troubles come soon together with the success.
Jacques Audiard was in 1996 only at his second feature film as a director, and it is obvious in “Un héros très discret” that he is testing his directorial skills. The film is conceived as a kind of investigation that uses the testimonies of the hero (played at the older age by Jean-Louis Trintignant – anytime a pleasure to see him again) and of other characters (former fighters in the Resistance, historians) in a sort of documentary reconstruction alternating with the action in the years 40s. Up to one point this works OK. However, I did not understand the logic of inserting in addition to these some musical sequences and short pantomime clips. The result is too complicated, and does not leave enough screen time to the main thread of the action. It is a shame, because this seemed to me the most successful of all the forms of storytelling attempted by the director. The atmosphere of the epoch is well-rendered, the main character manages to create empathy in spite of the lies and frauds, and the good acting of the team of actors, especially Mathieu Kassovitz, contributes to this. The message of the film is that France eventually has accepted the post-war confusion, and moreover, has forgiven, rehabilitated and even promoted its impostors. This is a sharp critical message that could have been better artistically supported if the beginner (then) director Jacques Audiard had not tried too many experiments. Anyway, “Un héros très discret” is an interesting movie to watch even today.