Article #28777

Cannes film festival: The Son of Saul director’s dramatisation of Jean Moulin’s torture by Klaus Barbie both benefits and suffers from its mainstream approach

László Nemes made his Cannes debut 11 years ago with the terrifying, Oscar-winning Holocaust drama Son of Saul, and followed that up with Sunset, his elegant, mysterious drama of pre-first world war Budapest. His next film, Orphan, released in the UK last week, was a comparably enigmatic film set in post-second world war Hungary. But his new film in the Cannes competition is a basically pretty conventionally acted, conventionally directed, conventionally conceived wartime movie shot in the sepia-subdued colours of an old photograph, all about French resistance heroism and French resistance leader Jean Moulin, who went down in history for refusing to talk under torture.

The overall effect isn’t really like Jean-Pierre Melville’s film Army of Shadows; maybe closer to the 70s BBC TV show Secret Army. Nemes’s final scene is even rather sentimentally stirring, though the director then tries to cancel this sugary moment with a final premonition of the death camps. At all events, he undoubtedly brings impeccable craftsmanship, and the performances and production design are strong.