Though it wasn't actually shown on French television until 1981, Marcel Ophuls' documentary epic, The Sorrow and the Pity, was produced by French, Swiss and German TV production companies. At 265 minutes, it's a slog, but a rewarding one: featuring interviews with French and German politicians, former soldiers, teachers and farmers, Ophuls' project highlights the difficulty of living in Nazi-occupied France. Part one, The Collapse, charts the events that saw France sleepwalking into collaboration with Germany, but part two, The Choice, shows an aftermath that was even more problematic. Told mostly via interviews with the French men and women who lived through occupation, former Resistance fighters, Vichy French, Fascist sympathisers and the politically neutral all have their say - resulting in a complicated dialogue. The Sorrow and the Pity ultimately tells of one country torn apart by just four years of occupation - "Krauts didn't denounce people, bad French people did", remark a group of anti-Vichy French, as Ophuls asks how it is to live with neighbours who turned them in to German authorities. Most fascinating is interviewee Christian de la Maziere, a French former Fascist youth that fought on the Eastern Front for Germany, now living in deep regret. As popular French singer Maurice Chevalier is forced to protest his innocence in a 1944 television broadcast and his own hit Sweepin' the Clouds Away plays the film out, you get the sense of a country left irreparably divided.
Lover of film, writer of words, pretentious beyond belief. Thinks Scorsese and Kubrick are the kings of cinema, but PT Anderson and David Fincher are the dashing young princes. Follow Brogan on twitter if you can take shameless self-promotion: @BroganMorris1
