If revenge is a dish best served cold, resistance is a bit more complicated. Fresh off playing the scene-stealing Jewish movie theater owner Shosanna Dreyfus in Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 Nazi revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds, Melanie Laurent shifted gears for her next role, playing real-life nurse Annette Monod in the French World War II film, La Rafle.

The film, which came out in France in 2010, just opened in New York and Los Angeles, offering American audiences a chance to see a different side of Laurent. Telling the story of the long unspoken about Vel d’Hiv round-up of French Jews in 1942 (also depicted in the 2011 film adaptation of Sarah’s Key), La Rafle (‘The Roundup’) follows Monod, a Protestant, from the Velodrome nursing station to a labor camp infirmary where she continuously defies Nazi orders in order to keep her young charges healthy and alive.

At a screening of La Rafle at the JCC Manhattan this summer, Laurent joined Rose Bosch and Ilan Goldman, the film’s husband-and-wife writer and producer team, to discuss the film. The poised Parisian was serious and articulate as she described working with Bosch, but refused to answer audience questions about her own family heritage or connection to the Holocaust. As Jewcy contributor Abe Fried-Tanzer points out, the 29-year old is perhaps France’s most well-known Jewish actress, most familiar to American audiences as the ass-kicking, justice seeking Shosanna—a French Jew. “Casting what may be the most well-known French-Jewish actress working today as a non-Jew in a film about Jews is an intriguing move,” Fried-Tanzer points out about La Rafle, though it perhaps reveals more about Laurent than the film’s producers.

While Annette is not Jewish, it’s hard not to draw parallels between the roles—Laurent plays two strong, principled women not deterred by institutionalized intimidation or even outright danger. When I spoke to Laurent over the phone after the JCC screening, however, she downplayed any similarities between Shosanna and Annette. “Because it’s a fantasy, she [Shosanna] can kill Hitler,” Laurent explained. “Annette, the only thing she can do is stop being a nurse” 

She’s right: Inglourious Basterds is a Hollywood-style high-octane revenge film while La Rafle depicts the heartbreaking true story of French Jews during the Holocaust. Yet just as Laurent’s Shosanna was a beacon of gritty determination—however revisionist and problematically appealing that may have been—Annette is the grounding moral force of La Rafle, the thread that keeps those around her, particularly the children she cares for, afloat in the orderly chaos of Nazi-occupied France. What makes Annette so consistently compelling throughout La Rafle is her defiant resistance and the quiet determination that guides her strategic actions throughout the film.

When I spoke with Laurent, she had recently participated in an emotional three-hour long screening and Q&A session with Holocaust survivors at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. “I cried all day long after that visit,” she said. “It’s a special audience.” The JCC screening—the film’s New York premiere—left most of the audience in tears as well. “I don’t feel like I’m at a premiere,” she explained. “I’m tense, I’m afraid of those reactions”
 
While Laurent said the film was one of the most difficult movies she’s ever made, she knew she had to stay upbeat and lively for the young children on set. But it seems as though there was even more of a sense of purpose that she brought to the role, evident on screen and in conversation. The Vel d’Hiv round-up, which the French government only took responsibility for in 1995, marks a dark moment in French history. “In the school books, there are, I don’t know, two lines about it,” Laurent explained. “That’s why it was so important to make a film like this for French people.” And for a French Jewish actress, the significance of being in such a film is even greater. “It’s important for them to see that,” she said passionately. “It’s important to be part of that sort of movie.”

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One of the elements that, however unintentionally, makes foreign films produced about the Holocaust so effective is that each face is unrecognizable, and audiences aren’t too busy looking for stars in the cast to distract from the monumental nature of its content. That was the crucial difference between the first two major films about Sept. 11—United 93 and World Trade Center—where the former succeeded in creating a tense, claustrophobic environment with mostly unknown actors and the latter flopped by casting Nicolas Cage in a central role, diminishing the severity of the situation.

When it comes to Holocaust movies produced in the United States, stars tend to appear in the lead roles. Meryl Streep won her first Oscar for a Holocaust movie, Sophie’s Choice. Kate Winslet did the same a few decades later for The Reader. Italian comedian Roberto Benigni cast himself in his heartwarming Holocaust movie, Life Is Beautiful, which was a hit in the United States, and Daniel Craig got the lead role in Defiance.

Other times, actors have become famous as a result of their breakthrough roles in Holocaust movies, namely Ralph Fiennes for Schindler’s List and Adrien Brody for The Pianist. Eagerly pointing out a familiar face can feel inappropriate, even uncomfortable, when witnessing a cinematic recreation of the horrors of the Holocaust. It can sometimes be difficult to separate these performances from their other memorable roles, be they in romantic comedies, action movies, or dramas, a similar phenomenon to what Starlee Kine noted about TV show actors in the New York Times Magazine earlier this year.

Rose Bosch’s La Rafle, the true story of the roundup of French Jews by French police in 1942, represents an interesting contradiction. Among the Jews portrayed in the film, the only one likely to be recognized by American audiences is non-Jew Jean Reno, star of Leon: The Professional. Then there’s Mélanie Laurent, first seen in the United States as Jewish movie theater owner Shoshanna in Quentin Tarantino’s Holocaust-set Inglourious Basterds. In La Rafle, however, Laurent doesn’t play a Jew. She portrays a Righteous Gentile, the Protestant nurse Annette Monod, who is not content to stand by and witness the mistreatment of the Jews.

Casting what may be the most well-known French-Jewish actress working today as a non-Jew in a film about Jews is an intriguing move. Like the devastating shot of the red coat that serves as the sole instance of color in Schindler’s List, Laurent’s Monod is the face that American audiences will notice most throughout the film. She represents the crusade against injustice and persecution, while the Jews in the movie are largely nameless and anonymous. Recognizing Laurent enhances rather than detracts, since she is a capable actress with a proven track record of playing someone who stands up for her beliefs and for good. Connecting her with Inglourious Basterds helps to contextualize the setting of the film, which tells an important story of one country’s complicity in the Holocaust that deserves to be seen by audiences worldwide.

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