No one will be unaware, when going to see Rays and shadowsthat it is very directly inspired by an authentic story. That of the journalist Jean Luchaire, a pacifist committed during the interwar period, who became director of a pro-Nazi newspaper during the Occupation, and his daughter Corinne, a rising star of French cinema at the end of the 1930s.
A biography dedicated to Jean Luchaire, published in 2013 (Jean Luchaire – The lost child of the dark yearsby Cédric Meletta), had described the stages of an existence effectively on the borders of great history and romance, of which we are surprised in hindsight that no one had made it the subject of a film earlier. The ninth feature film by Xavier Giannoli tells this double journey, that of the father and the daughter, but from the point of view of Corinne Luchaire.
That is to say, in the film, the point of view embodied, on screen and in voice-over, by Nastya Golubeva. His presence alone would be enough to make the director’s new feature filmLost illusions an important film. It is rare for a very young actress to be highlighted in this way by having to play such a diversity of situations and behaviors, where her talent radiates at multiple wavelengths.
The relevance of the presence of Nastya Golubeva is, among other things, multiplied by her use, in the role of a young actress now forgotten, who was for a moment the equal of Danielle Darrieux and Micheline Presle, after having started in Prison without bars (1938), by Léonide Moguy. This becomes for Xavier Giannoli the incarnation of cinema itself, of this device which, at the same time as it can concern itself with the injustices and misfortunes of the world, knows how to see and highlight the singular beauty of a person, taking them beyond themselves.
This dimension runs throughout the film, but muted compared to the major themes highlighted by the screenplay and which revolve around the character of the father and, at the same time, the interpretation of the headliner Jean Dujardin and the way in which the French filmmaker films it.
A story of collaboration
This dramatic motif develops around a line of flight maintained by the script and the direction. It’s about dealing with a journey that leads to what has been, for eight decades, an unquestioned, unproblematized obvious fact: a collaborator is a bastard. Rays and shadows does not say the opposite, but continues to point out that such an assertion is not enough. What was a simple statement is reworked from the inside, in several ways.
One consists – and this is rather little known – of explaining that the collaboration itself was far from unanimous among the Germans. Jean Luchaire had carried out his action in the 1920s and 1930s with a German friend, also progressive and pacifist, before being drawn into the Nazi orbit after 1933: Otto Abetz, who became ambassador of the Third Reich to occupied France.
With the support of Jean Luchaire in particular, Otto Abetz was, in France, the promoter of a strategy of collaboration fought by the hardliners of Berlin, supporters of an even more brutal domination, of pure subjugation, rather than in the perspective then promoted by some of a common, European future, under German leadership.
To this political spectrum exposed by the film is added the directorial strategy of Xavier Giannoli, which together highlights Jean Luchaire and his interpreter Jean Dujardin, in the complicated vertigo of the description of a character who, certainly a bastard, was also flamboyant, seductive, capable of generous gestures and who is played by a star whose charm and stature must be maintained.
Rhetoric and politics
At the confines of these two relativist devices, on the historical side and on the staging side, a third is deployed, perhaps the most important, which concerns the attention that the film devotes to rhetoric. The use of words and the organization of speeches which will, based on honorable ideas, help to accept renunciations, then endorse and finally support abjection, is perhaps the heart of what activates Rays and shadowsalso in its most current form.
When a party, the National Rally, heir to a formation founded by the Waffen-SS (the National Front), is at the gates of power in France, when anti-fascism has become a repellent for a large part of the political and media class, when the National Assembly observes a minute of silence in tribute to a neo-Nazi, the question of “slides” towards filth has nothing rhetorical or outdated.
As such, Rays and shadows is certainly a political film, not in the sense of its “message” (there is none), but in the sense that it asks each spectator to construct their own judgment: with regard to Jean Luchaire, with regard to Corinne Luchaire, with respect to the film itself.
The very remarkable indictment delivered by the prosecutor played by Philippe Torreton, who will send Jean Luchaire before a firing squad, sets out the political, ethical and linguistic issues that we were confronted with during the course of the film. This is not an indictment, rather a sort of tribunal where all parties have the floor, but in a particular register, that of the cinematic spectacle and not of law or morality.
Contemporary echoes
This ambiguous device constitutes the real crux of a film which borrows its title from a collection of poems by Victor Hugo, quoting a passage where the romantic writer sings, in 1840, of the presence, everywhere and in everyone, of a part of shadow and a part of light – twenty-five years later, the outlaw from Guernsey would say something else. And in the particular context of the film, this relativism is itself a subject of questioning, when the threats of a rise in contemporary fascism thicken.
And this knot is made more powerful and twisted at the same time because of the multiple other narrative lines that are intertwined with it. The relationship with cinema, as we have said, contributes to this, but also and simultaneously the relationship with enjoyment and death. Xavier Giannoli, a very cinema-loving director, knows and cites the great precedents in this area, including The Damnedby Luchino Visconti (1969) and Salò or the 120 Days of Sodomby Pier Paolo Pasolini (1975).
Eager for pleasure and prestige, Jean and Corinne Luchaire are both suffering from tuberculosis, a fatal illness at that time, which weighs on him and her personally, but not only. The repeated appearance in their luxurious and casual existence of bloody spit, during a gala dinner or an orgiastic party, also resonates with what developed in the last years of the Occupation, after the Battle of Stalingrad (1942-1943). Giving in to overconsumption, to a debauchery that is certainly sexual, but above all material and moral, is not without contemporary echoes either.
And there too, Xavier Giannoli simultaneously plays the game of spectacle, benefiting from the exhibition of bodies and the unleashing of affects and excesses, while reminding us that this leads to the abyss. Another tightrope that the production vibrates differently, the father-daughter relationship is both valued as legitimate praise of family ties, of an exceptional affectionate complicity and connoted of control and incestuous relationship.
Mixing all these ingredients with a consummate art of storytelling, Rays and shadows is composed of a series of back and forths in time, throughout its three and a quarter hours. This complex circulation, even if always readable, between periods is also a circulation between themes, angles of approach, emphasis.
And Xavier Giannoli’s ability to play on several levels with the virtuosity of a bonneteau player is simultaneously the vigor and the problematic aspect of the feature film, an ambitious fresco and a questionable film, in the double sense of the word: both suspect and calling for debate.
