Un Village Français 5.08

Les Trois Coups

or The Three Blows

Antoine and the others shoot their way out of the German headquarters. They all make it out except Marcel. He volunteers to stay behind. The others all make it back to the camp in the woods. They come up with a plan to bribe a German judge to commute Marcel's death sentence to life in prison.

Marcel gets tortured by the Germans, by Müller and by another German officer who thinks that he can teach Müller a thing or two about torture. Eventually Marcel is returned to a cell. He is joined, not long after that, by Alberto Rodrigues, another man who is part of the Resistance. He is also Tequiero's father.

Marcel dreams of moments from his childhood while he is waiting his next round of torture.

Chassagne gets becomes increasingly suspicious of most people. Raymond visits Jeanine when Chassagne is not at home. He wants to sell her the sawmill. She agrees to buy it at a reduced price but wants the Resistance to agree to remember what she did when the country is liberated.

Lucienne is disgusted by the fact that Marguerite was in love with another woman. She wants to do something about it, send Marguerite away, but Jules disagrees. He doesn't see a problem, as long as Marguerite is loyal to the Resistance, and he is relying on Marguerite.

The young men in the woods continue to practice the play. Antoine gets involved in it when one of the participants backs out. He pulls Marie in to play the role opposite him.

Daniel returns home to prepare to make plans to contact the German judge. No one is there. He sees that the table is still set for the birthday party. He gets a phone call from Gustave which gets interrupted by the Vichy militia.

Thoughts

Hortense, Marchetti, and Liane are not in this episode.

Its very convenient how they don't show how Antoine and the others escaped from Villeneuve back to the camp in the woods. Its also convenient that no one followed them. Raoul seems to disappear from the story once he returns with the others to the camp in the woods.

I felt that all the moments spent working on the play were a bit much. Most of them take place at night and they have candles lit to help them see. It is all very romantic but I would think that's the last thing they want to do if they are trying to keep their location a secret from the Germans.

The title of this episode seems to be a reference to a practice in French theater of striking the stage with a staff three times before a performance begins.

The plan to bribe a German judge to commute Marcel's sentence seems nuts to me. It seems like it is doomed to fail. I felt the same way about the plan to rescue Marcel, Anselme, and Raoul and that worked out much better than I expected it would.

There is talk in this episode among the collaborators (Chassagne, Jeanine, Servier and his wife) about the donations to the Resistance that many people have secretly made. They talk about it as if it was a tax. It is this that leads Jeanine to want Raymond to get the Resistance to acknowledge her purchase of the sawmill as a donation.

This is a decent episode. It still doesn't feel like the story has moved forward more than a day in the past couple episodes.