‘Nobody would forgive me if I told the truth’: new film about pacifist turned Nazi collaborator divides France

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In Les Rayons et les Ombres, Jean Dujardin plays a real-life press baron partying during the horrors of the second world war. Director Xavier Giannoli discusses bringing this still sensitive topic to light Xavier Giannoli’s new film Les Rayons et les Ombres (Rays and Shadows) is told from the postwar perspective of Corinne Luchaire, a French actor who was once hailed as “the new Garbo” but grew too close to the Nazis during the German occupation years. As Luchaire records her thoughts on a borrowed tape recorder, she struggles to reconcile her unfaltering devotion to her father, the once-powerful press baron Jean, with his 1946 execution for treason. Her wilful blindness collapses as the Jewish director who helped launch her career visits her cramped flat. When Corinne, played by newcomer Nastya Golubeva Carax, enquires after his sister, he reveals that she died in a concentration camp. “I didn’t know,” murmurs Corinne, only to be met with the devastating reply: “Did you even try to ...
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Full Time review – school-run thriller turns into high-stakes motherhood drama

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Laure Calamy plays a woman forever racing between maternal and work duties in an acutely relatable story that grips

Anyone who has ever broken into a sweaty panicked run to make it in time for school pick-up will instantly get why the French Canadian director Eric Gravel has chosen to shoot this film about motherhood frazzle as a gripping thriller. I was on the edge of my seat in one scene, watching to see if a woman running to catch her commuter train home makes it. Her name is Julie, and she’s a divorced mum of two who’s feeling the grind: work, kids, mortgage arrears, crappy ex. It’s such an authentic and relatable film – so meticulously observed, in fact, that to be perfectly honest, I assumed it had been made by a woman.

Laure Calamy plays Julie; she’s in her early 40s, with a couple of children under eight. Every morning, Julie’s alarm clock goes off like a starting pistol. In the dark she walks her kids to the childminders, carrying her sleepy little boy. Then it’s a sprint from the suburbs into Paris where she works in a fancy hotel as head chambermaid. It’s a high-stress job. “The guests are demanding. They pay to be.” Then it’s back to the suburbs to pick up her kids in time for bed.

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