This film from Bertrand Tavernier amounts to a three-hour valentine to the French Resistance and the wartime French film industry. Based on the reminiscences of film director Jean-Devaivre and screenwriter Jean Aurenche, it’s set in 1942 Paris, where for the past couple of years the German company Continental has been producing French films. Jean-Devaivre (Jacques Gamblin) and Jean Aurenche (Denis Podalydès) are among those who attempt to pursue their careers without collaborating. Devaivre takes a job with Continental so no one will suspect he’s a member of the Resistance; on weekends he bicycles hundreds of miles to be with his wife and daughter, whom he’s sent to the country because it’s safer. Continental wants Aurenche, too, but he holds out, perhaps because juggling three different lady friends leaves him no time to write.

Maybe I was done in by viewing overload at last year’s Berlinale, where I saw this film in the Competition (Gamblin won the Silver Bear for Best Actor), but I kept getting lost, and though Gamblin and Podalydès don’t really look alike, I had trouble keeping the two Jeans straight. Tavernier suggests that but for the war the qualité française tradition would have developed into the French New Wave long before the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd came along; it’s a dubious but unsurprising idea given that he worked with the qualité set (Aurenche scripted his first feature films) and that as a critic he didn’t much like the New Wave. Laissez-passer also gives the impression that the entire French film industry banded together to undermine the Occupation, that there was hardly a collaborator in the bunch. It would be unfair to conclude that the two Jeans have sugarcoated their memoirs; all the same, this movie reads like the Gallic version of an uplifting Ron Howard epic. In French with English subtitles. (170 minutes)