Cate Blanchett as a British Agent in Occupied France" "Charlotte Gray"

Cate Blanchett harvests so much critical praise every time she appears on screen (which is often) that it is easy to take her excellence as an actress for granted or to rebel against the acclaim as fawning. Watching her in the title role of Gillian Armstrong's not-much-seen 2001 movie "Charlotte Gray," recalled to me how good she was in "Heaven" and other movies (though I continue to dislike all but the final scenes of Gillian Anderson's 1997 "Oscar and Lucinda" in which Blanchett played Lucinda; Blanchett was also in the awful "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou").

Offhand, I don't remember any female movie characters parachuting behind enemy lines. Scotswoman Charlotte Gray is fluent in French and recruited as a courier from London to Resistance fighters in Vichy France (some time after the tide has turned against the Nazis) In addition to patriotism, she is motivated by wanting to try to rescue a downed flyer whom she thinks she loved, Peter Gregory (Rupert Penry-Jones).

Once in the picturesque small town of Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val in the Midi-Pyrénées, as Parisian Dominique, she becomes caught up with a dashing communist, Julien Levade played by Billy Crudup (Stage Beauty, Almost Famous), who rescues two young Jewish boys, André and Jacob, who escaped being rounded up because they had snuck out to play (Charlotte nearly landed on top of them when she was dropped in).

Julien is not on good terms with his crusty father (Michael Gambon) who raised him alone after Julien's mother died when he was three years old. The senior Levade is contemptuous of his son's politics, Julien is contemptuous of his father's cooking. Both loathe the Nazi overlords and desperately try to protect the rambunctious Jewish boys.

After the police pick up Charlotte's contact, she becomes the de facto governess of the boys, and comes to appreciate both Levande's. There are tense moments both before and after the Nazis move in to occupy the Midi, and failures outnumber successes for Julien's band of communists, as communists become the enemy for Charlotte's commanders in London even before the Nazis have been defeated. (On contrast to the screen adaptation of Michael Ondatjee's The English Patient, the adaptation of Sebastian Faulks's Charlotte Gray does not remove the political bite.)

Crudup, Gambon, and Blanchett are all very good. Blanchett really comes across as being a different person after her mission in France (back to blonde and back to being Charlotte Gray after being the brunette Dominique in France). BTW, the Germans speak German, but everyone else speaks English, so there is no way of assessing how good Charlotte's (Dominique's) French is. Blanchett maintains a Scottish accent, while Crudup and Gambon have some French accent.

The tensions may be a bit intermittent for the movie to qualify as a full-fledged "thriller" Both Julien and Charlotte take risks that seem to me not merely foolish but insane (and implausible, but isn't that frequently the case in screen thrillers?)/ I think that the movie is more about the transformation of Charlotte who mightily attempts to save some people whom she cares about and finds that her side is as callous as the Nazis they are fighting.

The French town and countryside look ravishing as photographed by Dion Beebe (Chicago, Memoirs of a Geisha; like Armstrong and Blanchett, Beebe is Australian). And there is a wonderful vintage steam locomotive (the only one in France, according to a DVD bonus feature on the co-operation of the townspeople with making the movie).

I think I appreciated the movie more having seen it after reading Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française and seeing Jean-Pierre Melville's "Le Silence de la mer" (The Silence of the Sea) and "L' Armée des ombres" (Army of Shadows), none of which were available here in 2001. I had, however, seen "Plenty," in which Meryl Streep played a woman dropped into occupied France during WWII (and dissastisfied by postwar life without the adrenaline rushes), though I don't recall whether it shows her parachuting.

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I am posting this review on Bastille Day in memory of Francophile Barbara Fields.