After cutting his teeth on an 18-minute short, 1946\u2019s 24 Hours in the Life of a Clown<\/em>, Melville approached Vercors about adapting Le Silence<\/em>, but was turned down flat. Undeterred, he took a gamble on making the film anyway, arranging to show it to the author when it was finished. Evidently impressed by what he saw, Vercors retroactively gave his consent, although he may have also been flattered by how much of his prose Melville used for the narration, which appears throughout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Minimalist nearly to the point of abstraction \u2013 both for budgetary as well as aesthetic reasons \u2013 the majority of Le Silence<\/em> takes place in one room, where the unnamed uncle (convincingly played by thirty-something actor Jean-Marie Robain) puffs his pipe and his niece (Nicole St\u00e9phane) knits while the soft-spoken Lt. Werner von Ebrennac (Howard Vernon) holds court. At first, he visits them while still in uniform, but after a month he switches to civilian clothes to put his hosts more at ease. He\u2019s also unfailingly polite and cheerful, talking up his enthusiasm for the union of Germany and France while strongly hinting at a potential union between himself and the niece. (His recounting of the story of Beauty and the Beast<\/em>, so memorably brought to the screen by Jean Cocteau the year before cameras rolled on Le Silence<\/em>, leans strongly into that interpretation.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n As much of a romantic as Ebrennac is, his illusions are shattered when he visits Paris on leave and learns firsthand the plans the Nazi regime has for his beloved France. The flashback to his trip is the longest time spent away from the uncle\u2019s house, and Melville and cinematographer Henri Deca\u00eb take pains to match their shots of Vernon sightseeing in uniform (which surely must have raised some eyebrows as the city had only been liberated a few years earlier) with stock footage of Paris during the war. Among those paying attention were the critics of Cahiers du Cin\u00e9ma<\/em>, who held Melville up as an example of how to work outside of the entrenched French film industry, and made a point of hiring Deca\u00eb when they took to the streets to start making their own features one decade later. (Among his credits: Louis Malle\u2019s Elevator to the Gallows<\/em> and The Lovers<\/em>, Claude Chabrol\u2019s Le Beau Serge<\/em> and Les Cousins<\/em>, and Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut\u2019s The 400 Blows<\/em>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n As for Melville, Jean-Luc Godard paid homage by casting him as a famous writer in Breathless<\/em>, but his real home was behind the camera. There he augmented the slick crime dramas on which he built his reputation (and his own studio) with psychologically grounded wartime films like 1961\u2019s Leon Morin, Priest<\/em> (starring Breathless<\/em>\u2019s Jean-Paul Belmondo) and 1969\u2019s Army of Shadows<\/em>, his definitive word on the subject. Like Le Silence<\/em>, they showed what life was like on the home front and the lengths some were willing to go to make sure the Germans knew how unwelcome they were. Tellingly, the only time Melville shows the room Ebrennac calls home for six months is the moment he\u2019s vacating it, taking a final look in the mirror before leaving. It\u2019s a gesture that would recur in many of Melville\u2019s subsequent films, because no one ever knows when they\u2019ll be walking out a door for the last time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLe Silence de la mer\u201d is streaming on the Criterion Channel in its full <\/em>Criterion Edition<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Le-Silence-de-la-mer2-1024x690.jpg\")
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