MOVIE INFORMATION

With 10 as a must-see, we give this film a: Stars: Daniel Bonnaffe and Carole Bouquet Director: Claude Berri Rated: Rated R for violence. In French with English subtitles. Length: 120 minutes

ROCHESTERCRITIQUE

Having seen this film, how would you rate it? 10 5 9 4 8 3 7 2 6 1

(Nov. 11, 1999) -- March, 1943. Lyon, France. A determined but beleaguered group of French resistance irregulars meets in a doctor's office, only to be discovered and put out of business by the Gestapo.

The moment lives in modern French history even today, although it has never been clarified. It is the moment when Jean Moulin, still a national hero and martyr for his work in the resistance, was put out of business.

World War II internal history remains a murky business, at best, for the French. The case of Jean Moulin -- who snitched, and why? -remains among the murkiest of all chapters in that history. Yet Claude Berri, who in recent years has emerged as a fervently nationalistic French filmmaker, in "Lucie Aubrac" offers a strong, fact-based, romantic drama from the darkest period in his country's recent history.

It is a tale of personal heroism and resourcefulness that is equally encouraging and poignant. It is also a film worth watching mostly for the lucid performance of former fashion mannequin Carole Bouquet in the title role. Politically, the film raises more questions than it ignores.

The Bouquet character's husband, a bland, passive, generally low-impact fellow as portrayed by the usually brilliant Daniel Auteuil, is a dedicated but tertiary member of Moulin's Lyon-based underground force against the Nazi occupiers. When, like his more fabled colleagues, he is arrested and marked for certain death, Lucie engineers a rescue scheme that outdoes anything Hollywood has invented.

Berri has little truck with the morally ambiguous climate in France of the World War II era. For all you know from this movie, every French person in Lyon was free of anti-Semitism. Time and laborious investigation have proved that quite untrue.

It is also worth noting that the real (although pseudonymous) Lucie Aubrac decided to release her memoir only within the past decade, at the time of the trial of Klaus Barbie, head Nazi in Lyon during World War II.

Still, Berri chooses to make a film about a case of stunning bravery in which a gentile woman goes to unimaginably daring lengths to save the Jewish man who is her husband and soul mate as well as the father of their young son and a child yet to be born. Berri is, of course, entitled to give us exactly the film he wishes to make.

For balance, however, anyone who watches "Lucie Aubrac" would do exceedingly well to check out other films on the same time, place and case. A recommendation? The peerless documentarian Marcel Ophul's "The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie."