Lucie Aubrac

That Lucie Aubrac (Carole Bouquet) is one tough broad. When her husband Raymond (Daniel Auteuil), a Resistance leader in Lyon in 1943, is picked up by the local magistrate for black-marketeering, she pays the Vichy swine a call. With her ice-green eyes narrowed and her square jaw set, she'd give Clint Eastwood pause, and Raymond is released.

Unfortunately, no one else in this movie based on a true story is as tough as its subject or Bouquet's performance. Raymond, of course, is picked up again, this time by the more formidable Gestapo headed by Klaus Barbie, and once again Lucie has her work cut out for her as she employs subterfuge, womanly wiles, pleas of unwed motherhood, cyanide-laced jam, and a lethal little handgun in her remorseless plot to set her husband free. Director Claude Berri, whose previous works included the breathy period pieces Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, generates all the suspense of a bedroom farce -- even the cockroaches crawling over Raymond in his squalid Montluc cell look photogenic. Fans of Robert Bresson might note similarities to that great director's A Man Escaped -- both films are set in the same infamous prison. Now Bresson -- there's the kind of tough director a woman like Lucie Aubrac deserves.

-- Peter Keough