By EWAN McDONALD
(Herald rating: * * )
This movie follows the adventures of three fine actors — Cate Blanchett, Billy Crudup and Michael Gambon — as they sacrifice their professional lives in a vain attempt to save a lost cause.
Along the way they will, as other actors had to in Pearl
Harbor, try to show that World War II was a long, costly and doomed crusade that got in the way of two men, one woman, and true love.
Blanchett plays a Scottish woman in London who speaks perfect French and meets a young airman named Peter (Rupert Penry-Jones) at a party. They fall instantly in love, have a one-night stand, he's shot down over France, and (she believes) finds shelter with the Resistance.
Charlotte allows herself to be recruited into British Special Operations, goes through training, and is dropped into France, near where Peter is thought to be.
She meets a Resistance group led by Julien (Crudup), a communist, whose father Levade (Gambon) disapproves of his son's politics but keeps quiet because he hates the Nazis. Soon Charlotte and Julien are drifting into love while Levade orders her to tend to two local Jewish children whose parents have been shipped to the camps.
I say, Julien, this Resistance stuff is all smashing fun, what?
• DVD features: movie (123min); commentary by Gillian Armstrong; documentaries A Village Revisits History, Living Through Wartime.
