The Art of Silence

Marcel Marceau, France’s iconic, world-famous mime artist, gave his first big public performance in 1945, in front of 3,000 GIs of Gen. Patton’s Sixth Army and a correspondent from the U.S. Army’s Stars and Stripes. Marceau went on to become an unrivaled genius of pantomime who captivated audiences around the world with his character Bip the Clown, who was wildly popular in the USSR—Marceau being one of a handful of Western artists allowed to perform for Soviet audiences. His popularity in Russia was cemented when the cult singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky included him in a humorous unrequited-love song, “She’s Been to Paris”: She’s too good for me: she’s been to Paris,and Marcel Marceau himself spoke things to her.

The joke here, of course, is that while Vysotsky, master of the spoken word, lost his gift of verbal expression in the presence of his paramour, her beauty moved Marceau—the high priest of silence—to speak. Marceau himself was no stranger to contemplating the tension between speech and silence that is at the heart of a mime’s life. “Never get a mime talking,” he quipped once. “He’ll never stop.” One of his wives (he had three) divorced him because he spent days on end in silence. (“She called it mental cruelty, he called it rehearsal,” wrote Shawn Wen in A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause.)

Marceau’s professional toolbox included a dizzying array of stares and gazes, hand gestures and head turns, grins and frowns—sufficient to convey the entire universe of emotions. But when it came to using words, he turned frugal. One of the stories Marceau left wrapped in silence until much later in life was that of his wartime youth as a Jewish teenager who joined the Jewish French Resistance and together with others helped save hundreds of Jewish children by forging their passports and shuttling them across the border from occupied France to Switzerland. He emerged from the underground at the liberation of Paris in August 1944 to discover that his father, a kosher butcher from Będzin Poland, who first took him to see his beloved Charlie Chaplin movies, had been deported to Poland; he was murdered in Auschwitz. His mother, originally from Yabluniv (in today’s Ukraine) survived, but he found their family home in Strasbourg plundered.

Like many who lived through the Holocaust, Marceau simply didn’t want to go back there. He spent the rest of his life perfecting the art of silence. It took the artist many decades to admit publicly that his past exerted a powerful influence on his art, and it is the subject of that silence that Jonathan Jakubowicz explores in his new movie, Resistance. The film is a fast-paced narrative of rescue and loss that keeps you at the edge of your seat. But it is also a story of personal transformation—an exploration of the choices one makes under difficult circumstances and how one is forced to change as a result.

When we first encounter Marcel Mangel (Marceau was the nom de guerre he adopted on joining the Resistance), he is a self-absorbed teenager in Strasbourg, a French town that sits on the border with Germany. It’s 1938, and the November Pogrom (Kristallnacht in the Nazi lexicon) has just shattered tens of thousands of Jewish lives across the border. However Marcel’s own life goes on much as before. Preoccupied with dreams of artistic grandeur, he dabbles in pantomime, painting and writing, and argues their importance to his skeptical family.

All that ends when his cousin, Georges Loinger (played by Géza Röhrig of Son of Saul), asks him to help Jewish Scouts transport to safety 123 Jewish orphans arriving from Germany. Marcel initially resists—he is busy; he has a play with 30 characters to write!—but eventually accompanies Georges to the border. It is here that he experiences his first transformative moment: As the Nazi guards pass the kids to the French side, Marcel’s lighthearted demeanor disappears. When his Scout friends realize that the bus they brought with them is too small, Marcel has a flash of inspiration: He can bring his father’s truck to help transport the kids.

This is a moment that is tailor-made for cinematic clichés: The lead character embarks on his hero’s journey; cue the decisive postures and resolute stares. But Jakubowicz chooses a different approach. As the words escape Marcel’s mouth, there is a split second of hesitation. Do I really want to get involved? Shouldn’t I go back to my play?—we almost hear those thoughts passing through his mind. But the emotional imperative of the moment takes over. He turns around and runs to get the truck—first a bit haltingly, then faster and faster.

It is these moments of emotional authenticity that make Jakubowicz’s Marceau convincing—and riveting. What we see in Marceau, played with exceptional emotional versatility by Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network, The Squid and the Whale) is not an invincible superhero but, rather, an “ordinary” human being thrust into extraordinary circumstances. The fear, the confusion, the anxiety are all written on Eisenberg’s face as Marcel feels his way into the new uncomfortable position of responsibility for others’ lives. So are the joy and the delight when his pantomime helps him chase away the ghosts that haunt him and his charges.

In Jakubowicz’s view, it was precisely these extraordinary circumstances that turned Marceau into the great artist he dreamed of being but feared the war would not let him become. “Sometimes the events you feel are stopping you from fulfilling your dreams are the ones that are shaping you as the individual who is eventually going to be able to fulfill them,” Jakubowicz told me. It was the children that gave purpose to his art and taught him to use it “not for his ego, but to help those who need it.”

Jakubowicz, a Venezuelan filmmaker of Polish Jewish descent, whose grandparents on both sides are Holocaust survivors, came across the story of Marceau’s role in the French Jewish underground by accident. It surprised him: “I didn’t even know Marceau was Jewish,” he recalls. He was also intrigued because it was a story of Jews rescuing Jews during the Holocaust—something only rarely seen on screen. He sought out Marceau’s cousin, Georges Loinger, himself a celebrated hero of the Jewish French resistance, who supplied Jakubowicz with many of the details of Marceau’s early life that went into the film.

Jakubowicz had long been a fan of Eisenberg’s and wrote the script with him in mind. “Jesse’s mom was a professional clown. He literally grew up watching his mother paint her face white to go to work,” he said. “He also lost a ton of family in the Holocaust. So I knew he was going to connect.” In preparation for the role, Eisenberg spent seven months training with professional mimes, including one who had studied with Marceau. “He taught him a lot of what you see in the film,” Jakubowicz said.

Eisenberg’s pantomime skills shine through with particular force in the scenes where Marceau engages with the children, both to brighten their days and to induct them into the art of silence (a matter of life and death for them). “What feels so authentic and real is that Jesse is really communicating with the kids,” said Jakubowicz. “When you see the reactions of the kids, they are not acting: They are truly laughing and being entertained by this mime.”

With the notable exception of a main character, Elsbeth, played beautifully by Bella Ramsey (Lady Lyanna Mormont in Game of Thrones), Jakubowicz cast most of the children from among students of the Lauder Jewish school in Prague. “A lot of those kids are also descendants of Holocaust survivors, so they felt the story as their own,” he said.

One of the reasons Marceau so rarely spoke of his Jewishness is that he considered himself an artist with universal humanistic appeal. He believed that human sentiments conveyed through facial expressions and physicality are universal, while religions, nationalities, and languages divide. He emphasized that during the war, he helped save not only Jewish children but also non-Jewish French teenagers, to prevent them from being shipped off to work in Germany when they turned 18. (He forged their paperwork and used his drawing skills to alter their photos to make them look younger.) In the speech he gave on accepting the Raoul Wallenberg Medal for his work in the Resistance, he dismissed any notions of heroism on his part: In his view, he had done very little compared to others, especially considering how many more could not be saved.

Marceau performed in Israel several times—the first time in 1949, shortly after the country’s founding. He died on Yom Kippur in 2007 and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris’ 20th arrondissement, in a Jewish ceremony. The rabbi read several Hebrew psalms in French and said Kaddish. At Marceau’s request, the second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21, his favorite piece of music, was also played. “I have the impression Mozart wrote it for me,” he once said. His headstone is carved with a Star of David.

Resistance opens March 27. To keep your social distancing and quarantine routine, look for a screening on your favorite on-demand platform here.