During the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s there were a number of high-profile war crime trials in France which ensured that the subjects of collaboration and resistance were kept in the public eye. These cases included that of SS Captain Klaus Barbie, the so-called ‘Butcher of Lyons’, that of Paul Touvier, head of the collaborationist militia in Vichy, and that of Maurice Papon, a Vichy politician, who later became the Parisian chief of police and a national minister. President Mitterrand’s own Resistance past was scrutinised for its inconsistencies. It was even decided in the mid-1990s, notes Seal, [25] that the image of the Lumière brothers, the founders of cinema, should be removed from the 100 franc note because of their Vichy sympathies.
Jacques Audiard’s A Self Made Hero/Un héros très discret (1996) was a film that drew much of its resonance from these changing attitudes in France towards the occupation years, and it was released shortly before the Papon trial, which revealed how the accused had been complicit in the deportations of Jews. [26] Based on a novel by Jean-François Deniau, it’s the story of a softly-spoken man, Albert Dehousse, who in his own words, “could never face up to real life”. During the war the provincial Dehousse (Mathieu Kassovitz) is deemed unfit for service and works as a travelling salesman. After liberation however, he undergoes a spectacular reinvention, aided by the mercurial Captain Dionnet (Albert Dupontel) and the profiteer Monsieur Jo (François Berleand). Memorising names, dates and places from newspapers and magazines, and observing the behaviour of veterans at their reunions, Dehousse passes himself off as a Resistance hero; so convincing is his pretence that he is offered the job of Lieutenant-Colonel by the military establishment, and he is sent to occupied Germany to interrogate possible collaborators.
“The best lives are invented” reckons Dehousse, and the cleverness of Audiard’s tale is that the themes of deception and fabrication are built into the film’s mise-en-scène. It’s structured as a mock documentary with the elderly Dehousse (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) interviewed about his past exploits and fake witnesses (colleagues, historians, politicians) discussing his ‘career’. Audiard also uses other distancing devices to remind us that we’re watching a fiction: thus the photograph of Dehousse’s drunken father – supposedly a World War 1 hero, actually a drunk – comes to life, there’s mocked-up newsreel footage showing Dehousse shaking hands with Resistance fighters, and we see the musicians playing the film’s soundtrack. And we’re aware of the process by which Dehousse learns to become another character: we see him diligently rehearsing his lines and gestures that will prove so convincing. Throughout A Self Made Hero, the boundaries between fact and fiction, and history and fantasy, are constantly blurred as Audiard grapples with what he calls “the biggest lie of our generation… The lie of France as war resister.” [27] As Seal argues, the experience of Dehousse becomes a metaphor for a whole nation. He adopts his position after the war has ended and his personal deception dovetails with the much wider myth-making around the French Resistance. [28]
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