One thing about Cate Blanchett is that you can never tell how old she is. She can play anything from a love-struck innocent to an immortal elf queen, and her face, her high cheekbones and slanted eyes, always seems perfect for it. Like a rare few actors, she can convey love, panic, arrogance, pride, fatigue, and despair through the prism of that face without ever seeming to change her expression.
That skill serves her well as the eponymous character in the World War II film, Charlotte Gray. Charlotte is a single Scottish working girl of undetermined age (mid-20’s perhaps, though there is a gravitas about her that makes me want to skew it older), living with two roommates and commuting every day to London. On the train to London, she is coaxed into a conversation with a businessman, who learns two important things about her: she is angry about the occupation of France, and she herself speaks French fluently.
The businessman invites her to a book launch party, where she meets a young RAF pilot named Peter, played with beautiful depth and seen-too-much sadness by Rupert Penry Jones. They fall in love, become lovers, and then as happens in war, Peter is sent on a flying mission into France. His plane goes down, and he is declared missing in action, but is thought to be alive.
Driven by a desire to find him, Charlotte accepts an invitation from the “business people” that had hosted the “book launch,” to train to become a spy for the English inside France. All of this is set-up, because once inside France, Charlotte (now called Dominique) meets Julien, the French Communist resistance fighter played by Billy Crudup, and the story really begins. She struggles to keep her cover as she grows attached to Julien, Julien’s irritable but wise father, played by the ubiquitous Michael Gambon, and two Jewish orphan boys they have taken in but must hide. The body of the film is filled with deceptions, compromises, betrayals, manipulations, and the tentative blossoming of love in so many different manifestations. Julien and Charlotte work together to fight the Nazi oppressors, and to fight the encroaching fear that nothing they do will make that much of a difference.
I didn’t expect to like this movie as much as I did, perhaps because I’ve seen several war-era films recently that disappointed me. And I guess it didn’t get generally good reviews over all, but I found it getting inside of me, almost without my notice. Director Gillian Armstrong keeps things moving at an even, almost pastoral pace that matches the tidy farms and deep green fields of the French countryside, exquisitely photographed by Dion Bebe. The pace is so comfortable, and the French country life so pleasant, that when violence, anger, and betrayal erupt, it is as though the viewer has been tromped on by thick-soled Nazi boots. And cleverly, without calling attention to it, Armstrong brings those Nazis in at just those moments to provide an external expression of the internal turmoil her characters face. Whatever else you want to say about Nazis, you can always count on them to move the plot along.
Billy Crudup also gives a compelling performance as Julien, the Angry Young Man who carries the weight of the world on his shoulders. Though the movie is named for its heroine, Julien’s character arc is nearly as strong as hers is, and his French accent even better (though it is a bit of a mystery why Julien has a French accent and his father has an English one). Neither Julien’s not Charlotte’s choices bring much resolution, but do bring home the terrible price that war demands. Only the ending, hopeful but not sentimental, keep those costs from being too high in the end.
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