Army of Crime: Virginie Ledoyen’s second chance?

Most British cinema-goers will recognise Virginie Ledoyen only as the exotic nymph who enchanted Leonardo Di Caprio in the 2000 movie, The Beach. But her gritty portrayal of a WWII resistance fighter in The Army of Crime, released in Britain this week, proves that there's more to her than a smouldering bikini-clad beauty.

The French film, directed by Robert Guediguian, tells the true story of the lives - and deaths - of a multinational band of Parisian partisans who defied French apathy to resist the Nazis.

The group are already part of France's WWII folklore and Guediguian remains broadly faithful to historical facts, told before in Frank Cassenti's 1976 picture L'Affiche Rouge.

Ledoyen plays Melinee, the wife of exiled Armenian poet Missak Manouchian (Simon Abkarian) who reluctantly takes charge of a group of young guerrilla fighters, some of them barely out of their teens. They assassinate Nazis and their collaborators in the streets, until they are themselves caught and executed in 1944.

The film's title comes from the slogan plastered across France by the Vichy regime after the group's capture, denouncing them as "L'armée du crime".

Guediguian's film exposes the uncomfortable truth that there was no unified, Gaullist resistance to the Nazis and that the motley Army of Crime found themselves pitted against Frenchmen as often as Germans.

Ledoyen, now 32, speaks English fluently and was tipped to cross over into mainstream Hollywood stardom after The Beach. But it never happened. In France, however, she is a popular and prolific actress and her delicate features made her the face of L'Oreal cosmetics from 2000 to 2005.

She told reporters earlier this year: "I'm not going to live in Hollywood - that I know... [But] if Scorsese called me for a movie, I'd probably say yes!"

WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING

Phil de Semlyen, Empire: "Robert Guédiguian's angry drama depicting ordinary men and women doing extraordinary, often brutal, things has echoes of Melville's Army Of Shadows in more than name. What it lacks is that film's ratcheting tension and the complex characterisation to turn a gripping true-life tale into equally searing cinema... Compelling performances and beautifully told heroics but the pacing is flawed in terms of a thrilling cinematic experience." Verdict: three stars out of five

Dave Calhoun, Time Out: "Guédiguian... calls on a rambling ensemble to serve the many points he has to make about wartime France and why people did – and did not – join the resistance. The breadth of Guédiguian's story is sometimes at the expense of dramatic momentum, but nobody could accuse him of over-simplification." Verdict: four stars out of five

Jordan Mintzer, Variety: "What Guediguian gets right is the eerie mood of Vichy-era France, where most of the population continued life as usual while their fellow countrymen were being shipped off to Auschwitz or burned alive at their local police station. [But he] loses the dramatic thread in too many plots, too little action and not enough originality."