Mein Freund, der Verräter

"Mon ami le traitre" is perhaps ,along with "le rapace" (1968) ,Jose Giovanni's best work.Had Lucien Lacombe (Louis Malle's hero in the 1973 eponymous movie)survived,that's what he might have become when the Liberation came in 1944.Like Lucien,Georges entered the Collaboration BY CHANCE.He was a lout,having been sentenced to jail before the war.He had mitigating circumstances:his brother was a hunchback,mistreated by his schoolmates.

Whereas "le Bosco" (his brother) commits suicide when the allies come to France,Georges tries to redeem himself :he meets a counter-espionage officer and offers his service to break up the last French nazi circles.In a nutshell,he becomes a stool pigeon.You often feel ill-at-ease when you watch that.French sometimes turn into torturers like their former occupying forces.Hatred oozes through the whole movie,as women who slept with Germans are cropped and the crowds applause when a militiaman is shot.Sometimes the audience is bewildered and is no more able to tell good from evil:the officer's (André Dussolier) attitude,and even more,his superior's are beyond any moral."Troubled times " the colonel tersely says.

In the last pictures,Giovanni makes us share his disgust with death penalty (which he had already shown in "deux hommes dans la ville" (1972) and which he would come back to in his final work "mon père" (2001).He and Andre Cayatte were directors who certainly contributed to the abolishment of the capital punishment in France in 1981.