Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Némirovsky's literary masterpiece
When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France-where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis-she'd begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. The film is not without its problems – Michelle Williams is an elusive lead, and a wide array of characters come at the expense of depth – but it’s a knotty, thoughtful piece of work nonetheless.The first two stories of a masterwork once thought lost, written by a pre-WWII bestselling author who was deported to Auschwitz and died before her work could be completed.īy the early l940s, when Ukrainian-born Irène Némirovsky began working on what would become Suite Française-the first two parts of a planned five-part novel-she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. Also refreshing is a sense that we’re thrown into the middle of the uncertainty of war ‘Suite Française’ works hard to free itself from the benefit of hindsight. Even the film’s portrayal of the Nazi soldiers is satisfyingly complicated. The themes of collaboration, compassion and betrayal run through the film, and characters who initially seem to be one thing, like Lucile’s hard-hearted mother-in-law (Kristin Scott Thomas), emerge as more complex. But more lasting than the film’s romantic angle is the snapshot that Dibb (‘Bullet Boy’, ‘The Duchess’) offers of a class-ridden society under the spotlight of occupation. At the film’s heart is a sort-of romance between timid Lucile (Michelle Williams), and a cultured, piano-playing Nazi officer, Bruno (Matthias Schoenaerts).
Taking the novel’s lead, Saul Dibb’s nuanced, compelling film offers an intriguing close-up portrait of Bussy, a northern French village forced to host a garrison of Nazi soldiers. In her late thirties at the time of writing, Némirovsky fictionalised the lives of people around her in German-occupied France. This is a handsome and intelligent adaptation of the writings of Irène Némirovsky – the Russian-born French writer who died in Auschwitz and whose two unpublished novellas emerged in 2004 as one book, ‘Suite Française’.
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