‘Moulin’ Cannes Review: Gilles Lellouche Anchors a Spare and Relentless Portrait of Defiance Under Nazi Captivity
A French Resistance leader faces his Nazi interrogators with stoic defiance, knowing survival may demand an unbearable final choice. In Competition.
Half spy thriller, half interrogation drama, Moulin tells the story of one of the central figures of the French Resistance against the Nazi occupation during World War II. Dark, spare, and rigorous, the film grants itself little room for anything beyond the day-to-day hardships faced by Jean Moulin (Gilles Lellouche) — and that restraint feels entirely deliberate. For Hungarian director László Nemes, best known for Son of Saul, this is another plunge into that era’s darkness, only from a radically different vantage point.
The film falls into two distinct halves. The first covers the meetings, the schemes, the secrets, the tentative romances, and the negotiations among Resistance members as they work to undermine Nazi control of the country. Shot with the cool aesthetic of film noir, and with Lellouche casting Moulin as something close to a 1940s spy-movie archetype, this opening section feels a little pedestrian — dutiful rather than gripping, marking time before the real story begins.
That story begins when Moulin — traveling under the alias Jean Martel — is brought in for questioning by none other than Klaus Barbie (Lars Eidinger). At first the interrogation seems almost casual, designed not to tip its hand. But Barbie slowly, methodically lets Moulin know that they suspect — or already know — exactly who he is. Moulin holds his ground, choosing silence, denying everything, fielding pointed questions about specific people and incidents tied to the Resistance. When he eventually senses the moment to leave, he discovers he cannot. The door has closed behind him, and what lies ahead can only end one way.
Moulin is unsparing in that regard. Apart from one brief scene near the end, it refuses to editorialize or broaden its focus. It stays exactly where it is: locked inside the psychological and political confrontation between a ferocious Barbie — whose subordinates are equally brutal — and a Moulin who is no longer certain he can withstand what’s coming. He can lie without flinching, deny anything put to him, but at some point he will understand that the least costly exit available to him may be to take the matter of life and death into his own hands.
Nemes stages several scenes of physical torture amid the interrogations and psychological pressure. Mock executions, real ones, savage beatings, and other methods are invoked — though more often than not they happen just offscreen. The camera prefers to stay with Moulin himself, with his mounting certainty that there is no way out of this particular hell.
In attempting to honor a revered historical figure through unconventional means, Moulin lands as powerful, austere, and occasionally repetitive. Even so, the tension generated among Barbie, his henchmen, Moulin, and the other prisoners — whose silence is equally imperiled — is more than enough to generate a sustained, suffocating dread. Once the film takes hold, it doesn’t let go until its inevitable, bitter end.
