Like many of the best directors, Jean-Pierre Melville seems himself like a cinematic figure, a self-created character whose manufactured mythos also feels entirely genuine. Born Jean-Pierre Grumbach in 1917, to a family of Alsatian Jews, he entered the Resistance in 1940, taking on a nom de guerre in tribute to his favorite American author. After the war, he found himself unable to obtain licensing for Jean Bruller’s daring wartime novel, published under the pen name Vercors, which was illegally distributed in occupied France through clandestine private channels. He started filming anyway, helping to set off a chain of events that would eventually lead to the French New Wave and beyond.
Befitting its shoestring production, The Silence of the Sea mostly takes place in a single room, a fireside parlor in which a monumental battle of the wills plays out, even as its trio of characters remains mostly stationary. Set in the early days of the Vichy regime, the film concerns the struggles of a man (Jean-Marie Robain) and his niece (Nicole Stéphane), who are forced to lodge a German officer in their country home. The French characters, who remain unnamed, provide the emotional and dramatic crux, while the Nazi Ebrennac (Howard Vernon) does all the talking. Insistent on ingratiating himself with his hosts, yet too polite to push or demand anything in return, he keeps up a rambling monologue, most of it founded on effusive praise for their nation, for which he retains a naive attraction, insisting he and his fellow Germans are only there to liberate its true power.
As with the film’s other minimalist qualities, the drama is isolated to one small question, which is actually a very large one. Will they give in, surrendering to the awkwardness of the situation and offering a fellow human an olive branch, no matter how despicable his allegiances? Indicating a savvy eye for drawing drama out of stillness and introspection, Melville expertly typifies the banal qualities of this encounter with evil by playing up the cozy drabness of the room, a homey but un-notable space beset by a sinister force. As the French pair sits prone and statue-like, the unctuous Ebrennac runs his eyes and hands over its surfaces, examining and commenting upon each item, searching for an inroad to gaining acceptance. He is persistent, but never desperate, keeping up an almost-chirpy running commentary that defies nearly every existing image of how a Nazi is supposed to behave. The only immediate comparison is Christoph Waltz’s Colonel Hans Landa in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, a character which seems at least partially fashioned after this one.
The taut tension between the film’s core triad seems to draw inspiration from its own production, which appears to have hovered consistently on the brink of disaster. Vercors was wary of anyone – even a fellow Resistance member – adapting his work. This meant Melville had to lobby hard, starting production before he had the rights, then agreeing to a tough compromise in which the author would convene a jury of 24 fellow members to view the final product, with a single no vote resulting in the destruction of the negative. True to that level of seriousness, this is not a film that’s ready to forget, or pave over the realities of the time. This vivid act of remembering establishes Melville’s at a distinct remove from the defeated resignation of so many of his contemporaries. This outlook would find its fullest expression in the cine-memoir Army of Shadows, but here finds an elemental form in a seething, single-minded chamber drama.
Despite an eventual hatred for shooting outside the studio, possibly fostered by the experience of making this movie, the exigencies of Melville’s fly-by-night style necessitated it here, with a combination of stolen street shots and those eventually captured in Bruller’s own house, which stands in for that of the nameless uncle/niece duo. Both of these qualities would prove significant, providing more material influence for the New Wave, which would take nearly a decade after the film’s release to fully coalesce. The Silence of the Sea is way ahead of its time in other ways, and to this day remains a sui generis artifact, a durational experience predicated on the viewer being trapped between poles of good and evil, in which the good side evinces no heroism or action of any kind, beyond silently resisting the intractable pull of the evil. What emerges is the story of two people holding off against the forces of occupation in the only way that’s available to them, a tiny form of rebellion that nevertheless holds paramount importance as an act of sustained will.
In keeping with this theme, the film is tellingly dedicated to Saint-Pol-Roux, the Symbolist poet who experienced a grotesque episode in which a drunken Nazi officer invaded his country estate, killed a servant, then assaulted and shot his daughter. The culprit was tried and executed by court martial, but Roux’s shaken state led to his death a few months later, after which his home subsequently fell into disrepair, suffering looting, occupation and bombing before burning down entirely in late 1944. For those inclined to pessimism, this might serve as an apt metaphor for the state of France in the late ‘40s, a shell of a nation whose dignity had been stripped away by years of subjugation, itself brought on by traitorous internal elements which retained positions of power even after the Republic was reestablished.
This situation helps explains why although the Nazi adversary is the focus of the movie, he is not the villain. Instead, he is simply the willing vessel for forces beyond his control, embodying the surrender to evil that the protagonists are themselves resisting. Thinking of himself as above the fray, capable of communing with his hosts on their shared human qualities, Ebrennac continues to impose himself upon them. He feels his outreach can foster a connection, but for the other characters, the shameless baring of that humanity serves as a further offense, proof that their oppressors don’t even possess the good graces to present themselves as the monsters they truly are.
Late in the narrative Ebrennac enjoys a pleasant weekend getaway in Paris, the nexus of all his dreams and fantasies, which turns out to be everything he imagined, his rosy-eyed ebullience allowing for total ignorance of the misery of the city’s occupants. Yet it’s also here that he finally experiences disillusionment, after a conversation with his fellow officers reveals the actual essence of their desires, which primarily involve grinding the French into dust, rather than uplifting them to the higher echelons of their untapped potential. The scales falling from his eyes, he chooses to abandon his cushy post, trading it for a far deadlier one on the Eastern front, where he’ll likely be obliterated by the eventual Soviet readvance. His choice of self-destruction is in some sense larger than the one made by the uncle and his niece, yet in the film’s context the two are equalized, neither amounting to anything of significance. Ebrennac is swallowed up, the unnamed protagonists maintain their firm stance, and the war rages on, consuming everything in its path, making no real accounting for the sacrifices that feed it. As The Silence of the Sea expertly demonstrates, fascism cannot be destroyed, only resisted, and even that heroic defiance does not guarantee any real reward, beyond the quiet comfort of having held out for one’s own principles.
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