There are many kinds of resistance. The one that’s perhaps most familiar to us – more so from the cinema screen than from personal experience, most likely – is that of taking up arms against the oppressor. The French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville made a number of films in which the French Résistance and its fight against the occupying German army featured, most famously perhaps Army of Shadows (which may come up more prominently in a future post), and as one might expect, the film depicts a heroic (if bleak) armed struggle.

While the setting is a similar one – the Second World War, occupied France -, the resistance of Le silence de la mer (The Silence of the Sea) is of a very different kind; as is, arguably, the characters’ struggle with each other and with themselves.

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