The Rays and Shadows

Xavier Giannoli's Les Rayons et les Ombres returns to Occupied France to tell the true story of Jean Luchaire, the influential French journalist who became one of the most visible voices of collaboration with Nazi Germany, and of his daughter Corinne, a young cinema star whose celebrity was inseparable from her father's political ascent. Around them orbits Otto Abetz, Germany's ambassador in Paris, a cultivated Francophile whose charm is the instrument of an occupation.

Narrated by Corinne, the film follows the family's rise through Parisian salons, editorial offices and film sets, where dinners, press deadlines and premieres gradually reveal themselves as the machinery of a regime. Giannoli, who developed the project over some seven years with the help of historians including Pascal Ory, deliberately refuses the familiar division of wartime France into heroic resisters and cartoon traitors, following instead the small accommodations, vanities and appetites through which ordinary ambition becomes complicity.

Running roughly three hours and fifteen minutes and produced by Gaumont on a budget of about €30.6 million, it is one of the largest French productions of its year: a period reconstruction of crowds, costumes and interiors built at the scale of a nineteenth-century novel, but pointed at the twentieth century's most uncomfortable French question — not who collaborated, but how a person talks themselves into it.

The film's governing idea is announced by its title, borrowed from Victor Hugo's 1840 collection: light and shadow are not two camps but two aspects of the same person. Giannoli's wager is that collaboration is best understood not as monstrousness but as vanity given historical opportunity — the desire to be seen, published, invited, applauded, arriving at a moment when the price of those things happens to be a country.

By telling the story through a daughter's voice, the film makes a second argument: that political guilt is inherited without being chosen. Corinne is both an accomplice and a child, both a beneficiary and a casualty, and the film refuses to resolve her into either. What Giannoli seems to want to say is that a society which insists on absolute moral clarity after the fact will never understand how it lost that clarity in the first place — and that understanding is not absolution. The film asks its audience to sit inside the grey zone long enough to recognise the mechanisms, because those mechanisms are not historical curiosities.

As indictment. One reading takes the film as a straightforward, devastating prosecution: by showing how banal and sociable the path to treason was, Giannoli makes the guilt worse rather than lighter, since nothing exotic explains it. Under this view the absence of moralising is the moral position.

Arriving in March 2026 as one of the year's largest French productions, the film re-opened the most sensitive drawer in French national memory: not the Resistance, but the Occupation's collaborators, and specifically the Parisian press and cultural elite that made accommodation respectable. Critics singled out its refusal of Manichaeism — its willingness to treat the standard opposition of virtuous resisters and evil collaborators as a comforting simplification — and several reviews framed it explicitly as a study of the "grey zone."

That ambition made it contentious. The film drew political criticism, and Giannoli and Dujardin publicly pushed back, with the director arguing that attacking a film on political grounds while distorting the facts is illegitimate; his defence rested on the seven years of historical research behind the script, including consultation with historian Pascal Ory. The debate itself became part of the film's reception: a picture about how a society narrates its own compromises promptly generated an argument about how that society is allowed to narrate them.

Formally, the film was received as a continuation of Giannoli's project in Illusions perdues — a self-consciously novelistic, "Balzacian" cinema of ambition, journalism and social climbing — transplanted from the Restoration to the Occupation. Coming from a director whose previous film swept seven Césars, and mounted at €30.6 million by Gaumont, it stands as an argument that the large-scale literary historical fresco remains viable in French cinema.

Praised: Jean Dujardin's performance drew the strongest consensus, described in reviews as brilliant and exceptional — a career-scale turn in which charm and rot are inseparable. Nastya Golubeva Carax was widely treated as the film's discovery, and the father–daughter duo as its emotional engine. Reviewers also admired the scale and craft of the reconstruction, the novelistic, "Balzacian" density of the writing, and above all the film's willingness to look at a complicated reality without ideological convenience; one Swiss outlet gave it a maximum five-star rating.

Criticised and debated: The runtime of roughly 3h15 is the most common practical reservation, with the film's density cutting both ways — ambitious for some viewers, demanding and dispersed for others. The larger controversy is political: whether a sympathetic, interiorised portrait of collaborators is courageous or complacent. Giannoli and Dujardin answered these attacks directly in the press, with the director insisting that criticising a film politically while misrepresenting the facts is not legitimate, and pointing to seven years of historical research.

Verdict: A major, divisive French film — received as one of the most serious attempts in years to dramatise the Occupation without heroes or monsters, admired for its performances and scope, and argued over precisely because it succeeds at making collaboration comprehensible.