The French Resistance hero Jean Moulin was 44 when he was captured by the Gestapo in Lyon and tortured until his death, in July of 1943. He has since become a national symbol of France’s fight against the Nazis, perhaps a figure of some renewed relevance now that various far-right factions are making inroads in French elections, and around the world. It thus may be an apt time for the biopic Moulin, a grim portrait of Moulin’s last days directed by Hungarian Oscar-winner László Nemes.
Nemes is something of a specialist in this strain of historical drama. His past films have covered the Hungarian Uprising, the fraught lead-up to WWI and, in 2015’s excruciating Son of Saul, life and death in a Nazi concentration camp. His serious, sometimes ponderous style is most vividly on display in Son of Saul, which uses the nervy technique of keeping the camera very close on one prisoner as hell is unleashed in the periphery. Moulin, by contrast, has no real gimmick; it is stolid and straightforward, shot in hues of black and pallid yellow, like an old newspaper. It’s a handsomely mounted film, full of precise period detail, but is otherwise undistinguished from many solemn, exacting biopics that have come before it.
