Although it was awarded the "Jean Vigo prize" in 1976,this "red poster" met mixed critical reception and fared poorly at the French box office . It was typically premature art house cinema ,but has remained ignored by the cultural channels to this day.Ambitious,not always successful,not very accessible,it is avant-Garde stuff.
Obviously intended to renew the " WW2 resistance movie" which spawned lots and lots of movie,some of them ,incidentally,quite good .
A company wants to make a play about Mont Valerien resistant fighters who were shot by the Nazis and the French collaborators.Their play looks often like a movie ,whereas the segments on stage are more avant-Garde stuff (the masked Nazi telling that the Jews do not "possess the soul to play Mozart ,Bach and Wagner ";Goebbels' "spoken " cast and credits of the work,which is some kind of spoof on this technique often used by Sacha Guitry)
The most salutary quality of the movie is the meeting between the comedians and their character's parents :"he was taller than you"one mother says ;the problem lies in the fact that these parents are also actors (it is not Cinema Verite).
But if the form is new,the content is not: the letters (from a resistant fighter soon to die to his/her child)which open and end the work have been used a hundred times or more;the poster,the purpose of which is to make the French believe their enemies are the Jews and the Commies ,is not new either.
One of the main assets of "L'Affiche rouge" is Pierre Clementi 's presence :turning back from stardom after "Benjamin" ,he began an utterly uncompromising career and prematurely died in the late nineties. He portrays Raiman,a nihilistic rebel.
Not devoid of interest ,but sometimes stodgy ...
