French Film Bears Witness To Wartime Complicity

By his own admission, Mosco Boucault was looking for a heroic father figure in the early 1980's when he began combing Paris for elderly foreign Jews who had joined the French Resistance. As a Bulgarian-born Jew whose father had died shortly before he came to France at 10 in 1956, he felt drawn to these forgotten Jewish combatants. As an aspiring movie director, he was also well placed to tell their story, and a version of his own.

The immediate result was a screenplay in which a Frenchman discovers that his dead father had been an immigrant Jewish fighter executed by the Nazis, a fact hidden from him by his mother, who had changed the family name to disguise her Jewish roots, just as Mr. Boucault's surname was changed from Levy after he moved to France. He even persuaded Simone Signoret to play the role of the mother.

''But I then thought the actors will end up assuming the roles,'' recalled Mr. Boucault, 54, ''and the real people will die without trace.'' So, instead, begging Ms. Signoret's pardon, he decided to make a documentary about the so-called Manouchian Group, an armed unit of Communist immigrants, mainly Jews from Central Europe, who carried out assassinations and bombings of Nazi targets in Paris.

Through a handful of survivors, Mr. Boucault hoped to rescue a crucial piece of Jewish history and to counter the commonplace notion that Jews did nothing to resist their Nazi executioners.

''Terrorists in Retirement,'' which is to be seen in Manhattan for two weeks beginning on Wednesday at the Film Forum in the South Village, achieved this and more. Between the time Mr. Boucault began shooting the 90-minute documentary in 1982 and its single broadcast on French television in 1985, it also provoked a heated debate that mirrored France's growing discomfiture over its wartime role.

The movie focuses on seven Jews, five from Poland and two from Romania, all Communists, who were among some 200 members of a ''direct action'' hit group called the Immigrant Workers (Main d'Oeuvre Immigree), which was in turn linked to the Communist Party's Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. Best known by its initials, F.T.P.-M.O.I., the group was almost alone in 1942 and 1943 in targeting Nazi officers, hotels, military convoys and even Paris cafes and nightclubs frequented by the occupiers.