“This Is Our Land” and “Le Corbeau”

Lucas Belvaux’s drama about the far-right resurgence in provincial France and a restored print of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s wartime classic about a town torn apart by mistrust.
In Lucas Belvaux8217s film a farright party fields an unlikely candidate.
In Lucas Belvaux’s film, a far-right party fields an unlikely candidate.Illustration by Petra Eriksson

The heroine of “This Is Our Land,” Pauline Duhez (Émilie Dequenne), doesn’t want to be a heroine of anything. That is both her problem and her strength. She is a visiting nurse in the northern French town of Hénart, popular with her patients and admired in the community. She is also a single mother, with two children to look after, and an ailing father, Jacques (Patrick Descamps), who used to be a hard-line union man. Her days are full of duties, and she fulfills them all. As for politics, Pauline never votes. “It’s no use,” she says. Like everyone, she has grievances and gripes, but nothing rancorous, and, besides, why make a fuss?

Enter the R.N.P., or Renewed Nation Party, a freshly forged (and fictitious) political force. The shrewd boast of the R.N.P. is that it will reach over the heads of a tattered establishment and appeal to those who, in the mind of the Party, represent the authentic France. Dominating the movement, like the carved figure on the prow of a warship, is Agnès Dorgelle (Catherine Jacob), whose rallies amount to an act of collective worship. She herself is standing for office in Hénart, and, by way of backup, she needs someone to run as mayor—a local candidate, scandal-free, and already familiar with the area. That is where Pauline comes in.

As coded movies go, “This Is Our Land,” which is directed by Lucas Belvaux, is not difficult to crack. The R.N.P. is akin to the National Front, whose leader, Marine Le Pen, is less foursquare but no less formidable than Dorgelle; both women sport a blond bob that could be designated as an offensive weapon. Hénart doesn’t exist, but, with its surrounding slag heaps, it suggests Hénin-Beaumont, a former mining town where the National Front has been in power since 2014. The film’s original title was “Chez Nous,” raising the spectre, invaluable to the extreme right, of a home from which intruders must be barred. One of the earliest images is of a tractor, plowing through dark loam and unearthing an artillery shell, presumably from the killing fields of the First World War. Nothing is said, but we are reminded that blood was spilled on this soil, for the sake of freedom and of France: a sacrifice that is ripe for the cultivation of political myth.

Pauline is unschooled in such grandeur. She is more concerned with cooking healthy meals for her father, to stop him from subsisting on sausages and beer. (“I’ll croak how I want,” he says.) One evening, she dines alone with Berthier (André Dussollier), a respected doctor, who, over many years, has lent a gleam of that respect to the intolerant right. Richer and smoother than Pauline, he opens a good bottle of Bordeaux, waits until the end of the meal, and then makes his pitch, proposing her as the ideal mayor of Hénart. “You’re mad,” she replies, but he urges her to make a change—“to bring jobs here instead of countries where they exploit kids as old as yours.” Note the skill with which Berthier deploys the personal touch: “You don’t fight for ideas but for your loved ones. There’s nothing ideological about it.” So speaks the consummate ideologue.

The trouble is that Berthier is the most interesting person onscreen, not least because Dussollier, who, in his long career, has made films with François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, and Alain Resnais, is so effortlessly engaging. We feel wooed and warmed by his gentlemanly manner, even as Berthier’s beliefs are revealed in their malignant chill. The movie drifts toward him, as if coaxed by his charm, and also toward Stéphane Stankowiak (Guillaume Gouix), an altogether less alluring soul. Normally referred to as Stanko, he is a boyfriend from Pauline’s school days, who falls for her anew—a surprise to us and a glitch for the R.N.P., since Stanko used to do its dirty work on the quiet. He was an active neo-Nazi, and his idea of a big night out, even now, is to dress up in commando gear, waylay immigrants, and imprison them in a cage. Pauline suspects nothing, despite the large tattoo across his shoulder blades, which appears to be a fascistic hybrid of tarantula and bat.

And what of the perils of Pauline? Well, she is coached and groomed: her hair is lightened, and she is presented to the public at a press conference, during which she smiles and says not a word. Beside her, Dorgelle does the talking. The platform on which Pauline will campaign is devised without her input, and, when she objects, Berthier shrugs. “It’s just advertising,” he says. “No one reads it.” In short, she is little more than a face, brought in to soften the look of the R.N.P., and Belvaux wants us to share her umbrage at this affront; but how sustained, really, is the attention that his movie pays to her plight? Not only is she rejected by her Muslim patients and scorned by her father (although many old militants like him, in depressed industrial regions, have turned to the National Front) but her own dramatic presence dwindles and fades. Around her, the movie loses focus, and, as for the climax, my best guess is that Belvaux and his pals had a game of Consequences, with the aid of a few beers, to see who could dream up the silliest ending, and then went with that.

We are left to rue “This Is Our Land” as an opportunity missed, and to wonder how else the tale could have been told. The parable of the innocent candidate, who is hired as a patsy in the political ruckus and turns out, annoyingly, to possess a conscience, is a cinematic staple. In “The Great McGinty” (1940), Preston Sturges introduced a bum who happily casts his vote in thirty-seven different precincts, for two bucks a pop, before becoming first a cog and then a wrench in the political works. In Frank Capra’s “Meet John Doe” (1941), another bum—Gary Cooper, if you please—pretends, again for a reward, to be the author of fake newspaper articles lambasting the genuine ills of society, and flinches at the fame that ensues. (A remake, set amid social media, might hit a nerve just now.) Both films are fun to watch and disturbing to contemplate. They are giddily convinced that, as one of Capra’s hobos says, “the world’s been shaved by a drunken barber,” and uncertain whether the American public should be relied upon as a trusty moral arbiter or feared as a swayable mass. Belvaux’s movie, by contrast, is a sparse and solemn affair. We meet the controllers of the political machine, but, aside from one skirmish in a housing project, the wider effects of their scheming remain invisible. If the land belongs to the people, where did all the people go?

Another time, another place, but the same toxins coursing through similar veins. Welcome to the sick but bracing world of “Le Corbeau” (1943). Henri-Georges Clouzot’s unforgettable movie, set in an unnamed provincial town, and made in France during the German Occupation, is now being screened at Film Forum. The print has been tenderly restored; the jolt of the story is intact.

Comparisons with “This Is Our Land” are inevitable. Instead of Pauline the nurse, we have a dapper doctor, Rémy Germain (Pierre Fresnay). He is first seen washing his hands, like Pontius Pilate; a mother in his care has given birth, though her child has not survived. Soon, in common with other townsfolk, he receives an anonymous and spiteful note, whose writer claims to see everything that goes on. (In French, the phrase used is “J’ai l’œil américain,” which literally means “I have an American eye.”) Over two months, more than eight hundred letters are sent, accusing the recipients of sundry sins. Worse still, each letter contains a worm of truth. The movie squirms with mistrust, and burrows deep. So, who is the culprit? A solution is eventually provided, yet it settles nothing, for almost everyone we meet seems capable of filling a pen with poison. Guilt, like the unforgiving sunlight, falls on young and old alike.

One cannot predict how quickly films will date. “This Is Our Land,” for instance, which came out in France less than three months before last year’s Presidential election, bristling with topicality, was soon overtaken by events. Although a new political party, born of an impatience with the existing order, did emerge victorious, it sprang not from the far right but from the center; and it was not Marine Le Pen but Emmanuel Macron who wound up in the Élysée Palace. “Le Corbeau,” on the other hand, is a hellbrew that has lost not a fraction of its flavor, and it feels all too pertinent to the age of trolls. Bitter and swift, the film allows itself a strain of acid humor that Belvaux might deem inappropriate but that Sturges or Capra—and Billy Wilder, for sure—would sneakily relish.

Upon its release, “Le Corbeau” discomfited both the left and the right. It was denounced by the Catholic Church and banned after the Liberation; Clouzot had shown, with mortifying clarity, how ordinary people could behave when given the chance to finger their fellow-citizens—and, in the process, to assuage their own lurking shame. His most fêted works, “The Wages of Fear” (1953) and “Les Diaboliques” (1955), lay in the future, but his loveless commandment was already carved in stone: Thou shalt hate thy neighbor as thyself. ♦