Resistance: Clumsy Marcel Marceau Biopic Stupendously Mishandles… Everything

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C-

The juxtaposition of the name Marcel Marceau against the word “resistance” may bring to mind an image of a famous French mime in white face with a horizontal striped shirt doing his proto-Moonwalk impression of a man walking against a high wind.

Now Resistance — a new movie starring Jesse Eisenberg as a young Marceau — is here to enlighten us that Marceau, who died in 2007 at age 84, had a life before his celebrated mime career. In his teens in occupied France, Marcel Mangel, his brother, and his cousin, were part of a Jewish resistance group that helped transport thousands of Jewish children out of the country to Switzerland.

If you have trepidation about the juxtaposition of “Holocaust orphans” against “mime,” be assured they’re justified. Venezuelan writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz’s wartime thriller is so ambitiously misjudged, it holds a bizarre fascination.

Shortly after the opening credit, “Nazi Germany, 1938,” we drop in on an adolescent girl, Elsbeth (Game of Thrones’ Bella Ramsey) who is being put to bed by her adoring Orthodox Jewish father (Edgar Ramirez).

“Why do they hate us?” Elsbeth asks. The parents look concerned and the father responds carefully. “I don’t think they hate us. Hitler is just blaming us for the suffering of the working class.” Well, maybe not. Moments later, there’s a hammering at the door and Elsbeth watches in horror as her parents are killed in the street.

Cut to next scene: Nuremberg at night, a vast crowd. But no, it’s not one of those nights. The event follows the Allied victory, with Ed Harris as General Patton, addressing a large silent audience of standing American soldiers as he delivers a speech which, we eventually discover, is a framing device for Marcel’s story.

We first meet our hero, the young Marcel in Strasbourg, France. He is the prickly theatre brat son of a Jewish butcher (Karl Markovics). Dad wants him cutting meat, Marcel prefers to sneak out to the cabaret to do his Charlie Chaplin impressions.

With his antsy, over-thinking manner, Eisenberg is always watchable though it’s somewhat puzzling that he’s living at home, fighting with his father about his future — Marceau was 15 when the war broke out, Eisenberg was 35 at the time of shooting. But let that slide, because there are bigger problems ahead.

When his cousin, Georges (Géza Röhrig) recruits him to help save a group of Jewish orphans who have been rescued from Germany, Marcel discovers his pantomime skills make the frightened children laugh and also amuse the winsome Emma (Clémence Poesy), working as the children’s chaperone.

The movie shifts tone a year later, when the action moves to the south of France and Marcel joins the Resistance, forging passports and, in one scene, blowing the flames from a performing fire-eater onto a nearby German guard. But a funny thing happens during the Resistance: Eisenberg’s character, still twitchy but more romantic and resolute, fades into the background.

He’s overshadowed by the villain of the story, Gestapo commander and notorious torturer Klaus Barbie (a.k.a. the Butcher of Lyon), played with suave gusto by German actor Matthias Schweighöfer as one of those prissy sadists who snaps out his German consonants like clicking boot heels. (An oddity of the movie is that French people speak in variously accented English, German Jews speak English and Nazis stick to subtitled German).

In the movie’s most operatically tasteless sequence, we hear the Jewish children, disguised as a Catholic choir, singing Schubert’s “Ave Maria” while Barbie takes his time shooting a group of circus performers, in their costumes, in an empty hotel swimming pool. (And that’s only the second most grotesque scene in the film, after the one that begins, “Are you familiar with the word ‘flaying?’)

Schweighöfer gets the most unintentionally memorable line of the film when he declares, “I didn’t get where I am by being nice to our enemies!”

The premise of the film, which places Marceau’s art form in the context of his wartime experiences, is valid. Marceau himself connected what he called his “art of silence” with grief and the Holocaust (“Destiny permitted me to live. This is why I have to bring hope to people who struggle in the world.”)

In practice, Resistance is a clumsy film that toggles between scenes of adolescent sentimentality and what feels like a parody of Nazi exploitation movie tropes. The combination is all too easy to resist.

Resistance. Written and directed by Jonathan Jakubowicz. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Ed Harris, Edgar Ramírez, Clémence Poésy and Matthias Schweighöfer. Resistance is now available on iTunes.