Les rayons et les ombres (2026)

After being recognized and assaulted in 1948, the actress Corinne Luchaire, a fallen star of the cinema, recounts her memories and the story of her family, which led her to her degraded circumstances through disastrous and immoral choices during the Occupation. Her father, the journalist Jean Luchaire, and his German friend Otto Abetz worked for Franco-German friendship in the 1920s. Neither of them was attracted to Nazism at the time. At a rally, they invited representatives of the LICA (now the LICRA). The Nazis’ rise to power in Germany in 1933 gradually turned them into accomplices of the new regime. Otto Abetz was expelled from France in 1937, but reappeared in the summer of 1940 as Germany’s ambassador in Paris (while the French government was based in Vichy), tasked with pursuing a policy of collaboration between the Third Reich and defeated France. Jean Luchaire then founded Les Nouveaux Temps, a newspaper intended to support Abetz’s policy. Meanwhile, Corinne Luchaire, an actress and model even before the war, tries to make a place for herself in occupied France despite her young age, but suffers the consequences of tuberculosis, which her father passed on to her and which prevents her from working. She alternates between stays in sanatoriums and a debauched life in Paris with the Gestapo countesses. In contrast, more positive figures appear, notably Jean Luchaire’s father, Julien, an academic and the husband of a Jewish German woman, who disavows his son in an open letter published by Le Figaro in the Free Zone. A number of journalists leave the newsroom when its collaborationist turn becomes clear; one of them, Labarrière, later dies as a victim of the repression against the Resistance. Subsidized by the German embassy, Jean Luchaire’s newspaper works for Nazi propaganda and is openly antisemitic and anticommunist. It actively participates in the return of the remains of the Aiglon. After the Liberation, in 1944 Corinne and Jean Luchaire take refuge in Sigmaringen, Germany, along with Pétain’s government and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. They are arrested by American soldiers on a road in the Black Forest in May 1945. After a trial before the High Court of Justice in January 1946, Jean Luchaire is executed by firing squad in July 1946, and Corinne is sentenced to ten years of national indignity. Facing widespread hostility, she lives almost as a recluse, but one day receives a friendly visit from Léonide Moguy, a Jewish filmmaker from Ukraine with whom she had made a film before the war. When she asks him for news of his sister, he tells her that she died in a concentration camp, and Corinne murmurs, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.” Moguy replies, “Did you try to find out?” The film is structured as a series of flashbacks from Corinne’s postwar circumstances, as she records her story on a tape recorder in voice-over. At the trial of Jean and Corinne Luchaire, the prosecutor borrows a phrase from the writer Charles Dantzig to sum up the accusation: (Théories de théories, p. 149).