Safe Conduct

Paris under occupation, 1942. Continental, the German-financed company, is gathering French film people under its own roof. Jean Devaivre, an assistant director, takes a job there for the express purpose of covering his Resistance work. The screenwriter Jean Aurenche does everything he can to avoid working for the Germans. The two paths cross in the same studio with entirely opposite intentions. Bertrand Tavernier neither absolves the cinema of the occupation nor condemns it wholesale; he shows how each person did their own arithmetic. Because it is built on real people it also produced a real dispute: Devaivre took the producers to court, saying his story had been distorted and his authorship not recognised. What he obtained in the end was a line in the credits acknowledging his memoirs.