Weekend at Dunkirk

June 1940, Dunkirk. Sergeant Julien Maillat's unit has dissolved, the evacuation ships are full, and there is nothing to do on the beach but wait. Maillat walks back into town, enters a house and finds a woman who has chosen to stay. The film's tension comes from there: forty-eight hours spent between leaving and staying. Its subject is not the heroism of the evacuation but the moral unravelling of a man with nothing to do. Maillat keeps trying to help someone, and each time somebody else pays for the help. The pace belongs to no ordinary war picture. There are bombardments, but the film is really interested in dead time, in an empty street, an abandoned house, a stretch of sand. It is adapted from Robert Merle's novel Week-end a Zuydcoote, which won the Goncourt Prize in 1949. Merle was taken prisoner at Dunkirk at the start of the war, so the waiting being described is waiting that was lived. It is also one of the films Jean-Paul Belmondo made at the height of his 1964 popularity. Henri Verneuil directs, with Catherine Spaak and Georges Geret opposite him. Who it is for: viewers who like war told through inertia rather than action. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a large-scale evacuation epic; here the crowd is mostly on the horizon and in the sound.