Don't mention the war

Bertrand Tavernier's latest film, about France under the Nazis, has stirred up a storm. Geoffrey Macnab meets a director under attack

Don't mention the war


The Vichy years were among the most paradoxical eras in French cinema: a time of shortages and political terror during which the film industry flourished. The pre-eminent outfit was the German financed and controlled Continental Films, which made around 30 features between 1940 and 1944, Simenon adaptations, romantic comedies and period dramas among them. Amazingly, the film-makers working at Continental largely maintained their integrity and independence. Their movies were never simply propaganda pictures on behalf of Pétain and Hitler.

"The French cinema succeeded 98% in not being Pétainist," says director Bertrand Tavernier. "That's the first act of resistance." His new film, Laissez-Passer (translated as Safe Conduct), chronicles the experiences of two men during this period: the flamboyant, womanising Jean Aurenche (Denis Podalydès), among the most celebrated screenwriters of the day, and Jean Devaivre (Jacques Gamblin), a hard-working assistant director who used his job as cover for resistance activities.

It's a measure of how sensitive the French are about the Vichy era that Tavernier's freewheeling, humorous three-hour epic has caused huge rows and led to a major fallout between Devaivre, now in his 90s, and the director who brought his story to the screen. In London to promote the film, Tavernier seems bemused and wearily amused by the controversy. He was, he says, inspired to make Laissez-Passer by the experiences of his father, writer and editor René Tavernier. "He was confronted with many of the same dilemmas as Jean Aurenche, such as, what can you write in a period of such censorship under a regime you despise? Maybe I made the film because of him."

Tavernier senior was founder of a magazine called Confluences that published the work of Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard and others during the Occupation. He was heavily criticised by the Vichy authorities for translating several chapters of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway's Spanish civil war novel (not a book the fascist censors approved of). He detested novelists, like Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Robert Brasillach (executed by a firing squad in 1945 for "intellectual collaboration" with the Nazis), who became lackeys of the Germans.

Aurenche, like René Tavernier, hated everything Vichy stood for. His screenplays written for Continental expressed this loathing, even if it was in coded fashion. It was his misfortune, a generation after the war, to be on the receiving end of François Truffaut's diatribes against le cinéma du papa. The literary adaptations that he wrote with his partner Pierre Bost in the 1950s were considered anathemas by the new wave; as a consequence, Aurenche and Bost disappeared into obscurity until Tavernier hired them to write his debut feature, The Watchmaker of St Paul, in 1973.

"Truffaut misfired - he should have attacked the directors, not the screenwriters," Tavernier says now. "By attacking Aurenche, he attacked the person who was closest to the new wave - the person who was ready to experiment and who was the most open. He was the one who told me: get rid of the plot; we must write only for our pleasure. He was the contrary to the technician Truffaut described. He was a kind of a poet, sometimes misfiring, sometimes brilliant."

Fortunately, Aurenche never seemed bothered by his fall from grace. "I figured it was time to retire anyway, and I had enough money to live on and preferred the country to Paris," he said in an interview not long before his death in 1992. He was amazed when Tavernier summoned him out of retirement, and would doubtless have been equally startled to learn that his old friend had made him one of the main characters in a movie about the Vichy years.

The relationship between Tavernier and Devaivre is more complicated. By organising the re-releases of two of Devaivre's movies, The 11 O'Clock Lady and The Farm of Seven Sins, Tavernier helped revive the reputation of a film-maker who would otherwise have warranted little more than a footnote in French film history. At first, the two men got on famously. Devaivre, a reticent old man (he was born in 1912), told Tavernier stories about his wartime exploits that even his family had never heard. He cooperated with Tavernier throughout filming and, after he saw the movie, sent Tavernier a letter declaring it a masterpiece. Then he began to backtrack rapidly. "Two months afterwards, he made some very minor criticisms. He said that his flat was more beautiful than the flat in the film, and he wanted me to include a shot of a castle he saw when he was coming down by parachute and bought two or three years later. We had several disagreements like that."

Gradually, Devaivre's attitude toward Tavernier changed. He had waived aside any suggestion that he should be paid, saying it was thanks to Tavernier that his films had been rediscovered and his name restored. So the director was staggered when Devaivre suddenly demanded 1m French francs (£100,000), claiming the only reason he hadn't asked for money before was that he thought Tavernier was making a documentary.

"Now he's suing because he wants his name bigger than Aurenche in the credits. We were very, very friendly and I was very hurt," Tavernier says. "It's hurting the film. It's hurting him. He's becoming paranoid. It's mad. It's totally mad!"

Such fallouts aren't unusual. In the politically embroiled world of the French film industry, every word and gesture is seized upon and interpreted in myriad ways. Tavernier provoked the wrath of the critics in 1999 when he suggested that bad reviews should not be published before the public had had the chance to see the movie. He was charged then with trying to muzzle free speech and believes he may be paying the price now. "It's not telling the critics what they should write," he explains. "Nobody speaks of a book before it's in the store. The behaviour of certain critics is completely different to the behaviour of the critics I knew when I was a press agent. There was a kind of rule among critics that they did not attack a film before it was on screen."

To his amazement, he has found himself accused by his enemies (he mentions Cahiers du Cinéma and Le Monde) of attacking the new wave simply because Laissez-Passer portrays Aurenche and Bost in a positive light. "It's mad," he says of the sniping that has incensed him. In his days as a press agent, he points out, he worked with Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy: to suggest he opposed their work is crazy. "I feel as if I am being confronted with the Taliban, or the Red Guards during the Chinese Cultural Revolution."

Defending Aurenche isn't Tavernier's only sin in the eyes of his opponents. His championing of British cinema is considered equally suspect. (Truffaut quipped that there was "a certain incompatibility between the terms 'Britain' and 'cinema'.") Tavernier adores Michael Powell, a director Cahiers du Cinéma ignored for years. One of the most delightful moments in Laissez-Passer is directly inspired by The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp: Devaivre, suffering from a heavy cold, is whisked from under the Nazis' noses to deliver secret papers to the British in London. It's a hair-raising journey, but all the Brits care about is pouring tea down his throat. "I thought of all those British films where they propose a cup of tea in the most bizarre places," Tavernier laughs. "In the submarines, the flying fortresses, in the house that has been bombed, the battleship, there's always someone saying you need a nice cup of tea. I remember all those moments with someone bringing Noël Coward and Jack Hawkins a cup of tea."

Devaivre's clandestine, whistle-stop day trip to England wasn't a figment of Tavernier's imagination. This actually happened, albeit with out the tea. Another remarkable incident depicted in the film is also true. Devaivre, a semi-professional cyclist, really did pedal hundreds of miles for a one-night reunion with his wife. "That's what I liked. It was somebody who was crossing half of his country for no reason in the plot except that he wanted to kiss his wife. I only show it once, but he did that in reality four times - 18 hours bicycling, staying a few hours with his wife, and then 18 hours back!"

Invited to speculate on how he might have behaved if he had been born a generation earlier and had ended up under contract to Continental himself, Tavernier frowns. "When I was making the film, I was always thinking about that," he says. "I'm not a sportsman like Devaivre so I would not have been spending 18 hours on a bicycle, or jumped from a parachute without any training. But I hope I would have the courage and ambition of Aurenche, who spent the whole period without writing even a line that would make him feel ashamed."

· Laissez-Passer is screened at the Odeon West End, London WC1, on November 7 as part of the London Film Festival. The Guardian Interview with Bertrand Tavernier is at the National Film Theatre, London SE1, on November 9. Box office: 020-7928 3232. Laissez-Passer is released on November 8.