GamesRadar+ Verdict
A much-admired text is respectfully brought to the screen in a film that nonetheless struggles under the burden of its war movie clichés.
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Dangerous liaisons...
It’s hard not to think of The Pianist while watching Saul Dibb’s WWII drama, an old Joanna becoming, as in Polanski’s Oscar winner, the thing that brings an occupying Nazi soldier and a member of the occupied together.
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Yet Dibb and co-scripter Matt Charman do at least make a stab at including a smattering of Nemirovsky’s vast supporting cast, among them an embittered farmer who joins the Resistance (Sam Riley) and a couple of aristocrats only too happy to make nice with the enemy (Lambert Wilson and Harriet Walter).
The problem, for British audiences at least, is this sorry episode in French history has been so roundly and repeatedly parodied – principally by long-running sitcom ’Allo ’Allo – it’s hard at times to take Dibb’s film seriously. Still, this is a handsome production on an important theme with a deeply tragic backstory, shot with precision and acted with conviction.
