Two men meet on a deserted street. One hands his briefcase to the other and leaves without a word. Inside the case, buried beneath some shirts and bundled newspapers, there is a worn, cheap-looking paperback called Le silence de la mer, written by Vercors and published clandestinely in France during World War II. As the pages flip open, we are transported back to 1941, when “No Jews Allowed” signs popped up in cafes across the country and the only tourists strolling the streets of Paris sported Nazi uniforms.
Now, as far as storybook openings go, this is not exactly the stuff of Disney, but it is a fitting beginning for Jean-Pierre Meville’s Le silence de la mer, which adapts the Vercors novel as a grimly naturalistic fairy tale filled with captive princesses, sensitive monsters, and an entire populace held under somnolent enchantment. Unsurprisingly, Beauty and the Beast is one of the film’s key references, with the role of the monster filled by a Nazi officer named Werner von Ebrennac, who is billeted at a cozy French countryside cottage inhabited by an older man and his niece.
A musician in his civilian life, the officer is charming and sensitive, a dedicated Francophile, and his fondest wish is for the occupation to meld France and Germany into “a solid union, where each is made greater.” He speaks of a broken engagement to a ferocious fraulein in the fatherland, recalling a sun-spackled, meadow-set outing where he queasily watched as his betrothed ripped the legs from a mosquito with ecstatic sadism. His love for France in general—and the niece in particular—carries with it a whiff of desperation as he searches for sanctuary from his violent compatriots. But the French are understandably skeptical of the officer’s attempt to frame the occupation as an idiosyncratic form of German courtship, and uncle and niece answer their guest’s heartfelt nightly monologues with a defiant, if fragile silence.
“Perhaps it’s inhuman to refuse him even a single word,” admits the uncle to his niece in a moment of weakness. Perhaps, but speaking might have been even crueller. Free to say what he wants before his mute audience, von Ebrennac can maintain the illusion that he remains a cultured, humane soul while serving a genocidal regime. However, the silence is even more perilous for the French hosts. What begins as an act of resistance can easily seem like a tacit acceptance of the officer’s presence, as the uncle himself muses in his voiceover narration at one point. The distinction between passive resistance and plain passivity is not always clear. Notably, once the officer leaves for the front, preferring to die rather than defy his superiors, we still do not see the uncle and niece talk openly between each other, even though the German’s ghostly presence has finally vanished from their home. One wonders if they have forgotten how to speak.
