HOLY COMMUNION Belmondo muses on the divine.

Diehard fans might tell you otherwise, but Melville’s career has always seemed divided between zippy diversions like Bob le Flambeur and glacial, methodical procedurals like Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge. Trimmed by Melville from a three-hour cut to a fully gripping two hours, this wonderful (re)discovery falls firmly in the former category—a fast-paced moral thriller in which the stakes are the characters’ hearts and minds.

In a sense, it forms the mirror image of Melville’s late-career masterpiece, Army of Shadows, which viewed the Resistance from the perspective of the underground. Léon Morin, adapted from a novel by Béatrix Beck, unfolds solely among the gentiles left at home. After baptizing her half-Jewish children to avert their capture, Barny (Riva), a lonely housewife with communist leanings, seeks spiritual counseling on a lark.

Possibly a surrogate for Melville (né Grumbach—a Jew and reportedly an atheist who fought in the Resistance), Barny pesters a young Catholic priest (Belmondo) who informs her that God isn’t absent during wartime (and, countering the prevailing anti-Semitism of Vichy France, notes that God loves Jews too). They form a friendship based on debate, soon tested by the prospect of romance—Barny’s girl-crush on a coworker notwithstanding. But subtext is everything—essentially, the priest’s devotion to his vows echoes that of a resistance fighter: He’s committed to facing hardship and following a cause greater than himself.

• Now playing. Find showtimes
• More film reviews
• Search more than 30,000 film reviews
• More Film articles