After War, a Witch Hunt

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Politics, as we all know, makes strange bedfellows. But as a remarkably tolerant fellow named Archambaud (Jean-Pierre Marielle) discovers in Uranus, even a determinedly apolitical citizen can find himself sharing his nest with some oddly disparate ducks.

The time is spring 1945, the early days of France's liberation from German occupation. The place is a small town where a large number of people have been bombed out of their homes. As a result, Archambaud and his family have a communist (Michel Blanc) living in one room and a humanist (Philippe Noiret) living in another. And soon enough they take in a Nazi collaborator (Gerard Desarthe).

The movie never satisfactorily explains how all these natural enemies avoid bumping into one another outside the bathroom door. But then they are, even the homegrown Nazi, very circumspect people. Their tendency is to mutter their ideological passions, not shout them. For they are, most basically, village folk, more interested in restoring the sustaining continuities of their lives than they are in maintaining their high wartime dudgeons.

Besides, Leopold (Gerard Depardieu), the town drunk who also happens to be the town innkeeper, creates all the melodramatic hubbub their little community can tolerate -- or a good movie requires. A poet manque as well as a sometime black marketeer, he has the manners of a thug and the soul of a romantic. When he is falsely accused of harboring the collaborator (and briefly jailed), his outrage, hugely comic but strangely blackened around the edges, is marvelous to behold.

Depardieu writes large what the other players in this typically French -- that is, typically terrific -- ensemble write small: the complexity of human motives at delicately stated cross-purposes. To an American observer, accustomed to watching actors struggle to find more than one dimension in their movie roles, the sight of actors comfortably, gratefully inhabiting contradictory, fully human roles is this movie's great pleasure.

It is, of course, the same bliss that director Claude Berri offered us in Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, his adaptations of Marcel Pagnol's fictions. And indeed, Uranus (it takes its title from the dark, cold planet) resembles those limpid works in its setting, tone and sympathetic anatomy of a provincial society.

There is, however, an important difference. Uranus is based on a novel by Marcel Ayme, not quite a Nazi apologist but by no means an oppositionist either. He wrote his book as a protest against the communist-led witch hunt for collaborators that followed the war. The film makes the case against the totalitarian intolerance of empowered Stalinism -- in French practice it often amounted to a settling of personal scores -- with persuasive force.

On the other hand, there are no Jews in this town, and the film contains no reference at all to the Holocaust. "When it comes to horror, all ideas are equal," Berri has the intelligently spoken Nazi say. But that's too smooth a dismissal of the terrible consequences of certain intellectual abominations. Some ideas really are more equal than others in their destructive power. Yet even as one condemns this sophistry, one has to acknowledge Berri's courage in thinking about what must be for him, as a Jew, the unthinkable. The power, as well as the perversity, of his movie derives from the same source: a need to reimagine a historical passage long since encrusted with right-thinking cliches.