Synopsis
Army of Crime (L'Armée du crime, 2009) is Robert Guédiguian's historical war drama, and you can watch online a near-forgotten chapter of the French Resistance. Paris, 1943, under occupation. Missak Manouchian — an Armenian-born poet who earns his living shaping wood — gathers a handful of young immigrants around him: Jews, Spaniards, Italians, Poles, Hungarians.
What binds them isn't a passport but the France they believe in, the country that once promised the rights of man. They plant bombs, derail German plans and pull off dozens of brazen strikes across a single year — paying for each one with surveillance, informants, betrayal and torture at the hands of a French police force serving the occupiers. Simon Abkarian plays Manouchian, alongside Virginie Ledoyen, Jean-Pierre Darroussin and a very young Pierre Niney.
The title itself is an insult the fighters turned around: that's how the Nazi propaganda of the "Affiche Rouge" labeled this band of foreigners, hoping to paint them as common criminals — and instead made martyrs of them. Guédiguian films without heroic gloss, watching ordinary émigrés choose resistance and death. It's heavy, necessary cinema for anyone after a war drama with no varnish. Stream Army of Crime (2009) online on iFILM.
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