Farm worker Benoît Labarie (Sam Riley) detests them and is ready to take arms against them, not least because strutting young Nazi officer Kurt Bonnet (Tom Schilling) is making approaches on his wife (Ruth Wilson). Local aristocrats Viscount de Montmort (Lambert Wilson) and Viscountess de Montmort (Harriet Walter) organise picnics with the Germans. Others regard the arrival of the Wehrmacht as an excuse to settle scores and write letters to the German commanders gleefully denouncing their neighbours.Īs the occupation continues, it provokes acts of venality, cowardice and hypocrisy as well as of extreme heroism. 'There had been no men in our town for so long,' the voiceover gushes as we see the women ogling shirtless Germans in the square. In one unwittingly comic scene, some local women are intrigued by the strapping soldiers in their midst. However, the film-makers also attempt to show the deeply ambivalent feelings of the French toward their invaders. We are now in charge!' one officer shrieks at the defeated townsfolk. There are plenty of gimlet-eyed fanatics on display, browbeating the French and even changing the time on their clocks. It would be perverse in the extreme to portray the Nazis as sympathetic.

The screenplay, by Dibb and Matt Charman, strives to go beyond the usual caricatures found in Second World War movies. This is incongruous (especially as they write in French) but preferable to the 'Allo 'Allo!-style grotesquerie of many British dramas about the French resistance. The French characters speak in English with BBC-style accents. As we hear Lucile's emotional voice-over or see shots of her with the sunlight glistening in her hair while elegiac music plays on the soundtrack, the film skirts close to Brief Encounter-style melodrama. The emphasis is firmly on the love affair between the unhappily married French woman Lucile Angellier (Michelle Williams) and young German officer Bruno von Falk (Matthias Schoenaerts). Based primarily on 'Dolce', the second part of Némirovsky's book, it is a rousing but lop-sided adaptation of the novel. Saul Dibb's film version is unabashedly romantic.

She wrote about both good and bad behaviour, heroism and cowardice, in every stratum of French society. It was as if, from beyond the grave, Némirovsky was giving a modern-day readership an intimate eyewitness account, harrowing and ironic, of the experience of the Nazi occupation for the French. Irène Némirovsky's unfinished novel Suite Française, written shortly before her death in Auschwitz in 1942 but not published until 2004, was described by the French newspaper Le Monde as 'a masterpiece… ripped from oblivion'.

La suite francaise irene nemirovsky