Suite Francaise (15)
Directed by Saul Dibb
2 stars

IN 1942, Jewish Holocaust victim Irene Nemirovsky died in Auschwitz. In 2004 her unfinished novel Suite Francaise became an international bestseller.

Here, scripted by director Saul Dibb and Matt Charman, Nemirovsky’s original is transformed into a less than compelling melodrama.

The “forbidden” romance between a French woman and a “sensitive” German officer in a nazi-occupied village during WWII emerges as an expensive but shallow made-for-television drama.

In fact the BBC, along with the National Lottery, funded the film and the outcome does make one question whether our money’s been wisely spent.

Considerable first-person narration is required to flesh out what is an uncomplicated drama focusing on Frenchwoman Lucile Angellier (Michelle Williams), whose husband is a prisoner of war and who lives with her cold-hearted mother-in-law (Kristin Scott Thomas).

When Germans occupy their village, refined German officer Bruno von Falk (Matthias Schoenaerts) is billeted in their home. His sensitive piano playing is the catalyst for a forbidden romance with Angellier.

Williams and Schoenarts do what they can to fight off the cliches and Scott Thomas’s character “could scare the plague away,” while Sam Riley deserves better than his schematic role as Benoit, a communist farmer fighting the nazis.

Dibb makes a brave fist of attempting to dramatise the character interplay but largely falls victim to a screenplay that, among its many irritations, has its characters emoting aloud in English while being shown to write in French.

Where he does score, however, is in staging the early scenes of hosts of exhausted and terrified refugees clogging the country roads as they flee the invading Germans.

Dibb creates a genuine sense of terror and desolation, effectively underlined when aircraft bomb the refugees and a snowstorm of propaganda leaflets rain down on the terrified villagers as German troops take over.

What follows, though, fails to convince.