Moulin: “The resistance fighter is an extremely isolated, vulnerable, abandoned being…”

Eleven years after Son of Saul, László Nemes makes his first French film. He tells us how Gilles Lellouche seized the emblematic figure of the Resistance. Encounter.

How can we do justice to Jean Moulin, heroic figure of the Resistance, without making him a disembodied icon?

Eleven years later The Son of SaulLászló Nemes takes up the challenge with Gilles Lellouche in the title role, filming a man in dire straits, almost antiheroic, far from the image that History has retained. The Romanian director chose to tell the story of the resistance fighter as close as possible to his solitude, in his face-to-face encounter with Klaus Barbie:

“For me, the resistance fighter is an extremely isolated, vulnerable being, abandoned by everyone”describes the director in the new issue 578 of First. “And Moulin was at the end of his life, in an extreme way. This solitude was the energy on the basis of which I wanted to build the character and the film.”

Distancing himself from the naive vision of the man who resisted to the end without failing, Mill depicts the psychological suffering that accompanied Jean Moulin after his capture.

In a scene from the film, we see him in the back of a car with Barbie (Lars Eidinger). At the end of the latter’s long sinister monologue, he has a sort of spasm to catch his breath, as if he had spent the entire sequence in apnea. “Yes, that’s exactly it. I can tell you that he was very bad, next to this man at that moment. I felt it live…..