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March 1942: like Paris, the medium of the cinema lives under the Nazi boot. Alfred Greven, free electron of the UFA who became owner of Continental, controls French production. He likes the cinema, particularly French cinema and wishes for the best to work, and sometimes closes his eyes on a Jew or a Communist whom he knows to be irreplaceable. In these times of rationing, where film and electricity are rare, the Continental is impossible to circumvent. Dangerous too. Those who work there know it: one can lose his freedom or his soul there. The screenwriter Jean Aurenche obstinately rejects Greven and doesn't want to collaborate. He already has enough to do, too many manuscripts to rewrite, too many mistresses to whom he must lie. What to do when one has only his pen to write and no place to call home? Certainly not to throw oneself in the wolf's mouth, even for a pot of gold or a weekly delivery of the best the black market has to offer. The choice is more complex for Jean Devaivre. When one has a wife and baby and one wants to direct, one reflects before refusing, even if it means to be very careful and to never sign a contract that in the eyes of the world would look like a pact with the devil. By crossing the path of these two film professionals, each resisting in his own way, Tavernier has built a comprehensive work that helps to heal wounds of the Nazi Occupation. Beyond the personal ties—Aurenche went on to write Coup de Torchon and other scripts that Tavernier directed—he creates a portrait of French cinema of a certain era. By wanting to embrace a not very glorious truth, Tavernier embarrasses. Taking the self-centered Parisian cinematic world as a paradigm and making it a polaroid of 1940's France would have been easy prey for journalists (a profession that also had its share of collaboration during the Occupation). One would like to speak about film as an object and subject of cinema and to evoke the faltering early technique. One would like to pay homage to the grace Denis Podalydès and the density of Jacques Gamblin. And the talent of all the others. How sympathetic are the French when everything is fine? And suddenly an issue is raised about Tavernier's impossible fiction. With his co-writer Jean Cosmos, they wanted a great French film, a fresco where the large and small roles, like the Resistance, would each bring their contribution. And to go there with anecdotes and small stories would better tell the big story. If the film shows that the productions of the time were deliberate entertainment, a term to be understood in its most trivial sense, he works hard to clarify the complexity of the true stakes. Of course, to make films under the Kraut's watchful eye is a slippery exercise. The director's goal is not any less. French cinema must be one big close-knit family! They all may disagree on politics, but they all agree they want the Germans to leave and the best thing to do is to keep making films. But behind this obsession to shoot that Tavernier shares, one perceives a France that just gives up resisting and still does not want to see itself onscreen. It's an illusion in fact, where turnips replace bread and meat, where scriptwriters dying of hunger maliciously sleep on the paper of the scenes of gastronomic orgy, where some poor girls take off their pantyhose for a third class role. One sees Michel Simon refusing to film The Happiness of Ladies, which the very young André Cayatte tries to make. But when a technician points out that he's not lacking balls, a comrade observes that the balls in question have the advantage of being "Swiss " and not "Gallic", i.e. neutral. So still, the moral of the film was summarized by this slightly shameful confession of fear of hunger. But of the early opposition that began with a tiny fist, that of Le Chanois, a Communist and Jew, who in 1943 wrote The Devil's Hand (directed for Continental by Maurice Turner), or with Devaivre, Spaak, Paul Bost, Harry Baur, Tavernier tries to make this resistance of these few as the resistance of everyone. Nothing about the forced (or voluntary) trip of French actors to Berlin in March 1942. Nothing about informers, apart from a eulogistic allusion to Clouzot's Corbeau. Nothing, if not these half rabbits and these pounds of butter which one exchanges under the table. It makes one think that the entire French dilemma during this time was definitively summarized by food. Why is the fate of the Jewish technicians and artists so diminished? Why as a resistor, in fact, does Tavernier show a Vichy official as someone who takes part in the Resistance? The purpose of not to attack Bertrand Tavernier. His sin is excessive love for cinema, so much so that he stubbornly persists to make the conduct of a few the choice of an imaginary France. It is also the praise for a cinema that was later attacked by the French New Wave and blacklisted by Cahiers du Cinéma. "There is nothing more beautiful than true stories", reads the poster. It is undoubtedly this awkward self-justification which makes Safe Conduct an impossible film, just as Schindler's List was. Moreover, what could be more revealing than the painful polemic between Tavernier and Devaivre is to illustrate that this truth, brandished like a torch, has several facets and is not always representative. One awaited something else other than this "Silence! Rolling", as one still awaits an epic French film about the Occupation, an epic about the war of Algeria, which would finally prove that the French cultural pride is not only self-censorship.
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