PARIS, Jan. 8   —   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.

	Raymond Kojitski, a Parisian tailor, is a subject of "Terrorists in Retirement." (Mosco Boucault)

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 Immigr™e), 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.

After its leader, Missak Manouchian, an Armenian poet, and 22 others were arrested in late 1943 and executed on Feb. 21, 1944, the Nazis plastered Paris with a red poster carrying the photographs of a dozen of them and denouncing them as "Jewish, Armenian and other stateless terrorists." After the war, however, the poster became a badge of honor: Louis Aragon wrote a poem, "L'Affiche Rouge" ("The Red Poster"), which Leo Ferr™ put to music; two decades later Philippe Ganier-Raymond's book by the same name helped inspire Mr. Boucault's film. In the movie, the old combatants, several of them still working as tailors in eastern Paris, tell the story of their flight to France in the 1930's and their shock when Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler in 1939. As loyal Communists, they obeyed instructions to accept Germany's conquest of France in June 1940, but they were also delighted when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in July 1941: at last the French Communist Party was under orders from Moscow to terrorize the Nazi occupation forces.

Mr. Boucault said that at times it was hard to follow the men as they excitedly recounted their guerrilla actions, so he persuaded them to re-enact some dramatic moments on the streets of Paris, even to the point of having them wave pistols and hurry down escape paths. "I thought, 'Why not recall the incidents with movements as well as words?' " he said. "And they really got caught up it in all. I think they enjoyed going back to those times."

When they came to discussing the circumstances of the roundup of the group, however, things became more complicated. There was consensus that they were betrayed by one of their number, Joseph Davidovitch, who was arrested and tortured by the Nazis (before being released and shot by the Resistance). But some survivors also felt the French Communist Party had sacrificed the unit by refusing to smuggle vital Jewish combatants out of Paris after the French police began to tail them.

This was certainly the view held by Manouchian's widow, Melin™e. In the last letter she received from her husband before his execution, he said that he forgave everyone except "the one who betrayed us to save his skin and those who sold us." For her and several others, foreign Jews who joined the Resistance because "they had nothing to lose" were not given the same protection as French Communists. For some, the Communist Party even preferred to have heroes with more French names than, say, Mitzflicker, Gronowski and Rayski. "I had wanted to show that Jews were not only victims," Mr. Boucault recalled, "and I learned only later of the Communist betrayal." It was this charge, however, that almost sank his film. After he made it for the government television channel Antenne-2, the documentary sat on a shelf until it was finally set for broadcast in June 1985. The French Communist Party, which from 1982 to 1984 had been part of President Franôcois Mitterrand's Socialist-led coalition, immediately protested.

The channel then sought the view of the government's High Authority of Audiovisual Communication, which in turn consulted five Resistance heroes. They criticized the film, and Antenne-2 canceled it. A fierce debate followed, with charges of censorship pouring in, including from Ms. Signoret, who had recorded the voice-over commentary. One month after originally scheduled, the film was finally shown.

The controversy proved useful. Not only did the film draw a large audience, but it also threw the spotlight on neglected Jewish heroes and added momentum to cautious moves to look afresh at France's wartime record. Today "Terrorists in Retirement" would no longer provoke discord here, partly because the Communist Party is now a shadow of its old self, but, more important, because little remains of the Gaullist myth that France stood firm against the Nazi occupiers.

Movies, books and two war-crimes trials of French collaborators, Paul Touvier and Maurice Papon, have told a less uplifting story of the deep involvement of the collaborationist Vichy regime and of the French police and militia in the deportation of 76,000 Jews from France to Nazi death camps. Inevitably, though, this new information has reinforced the image of Jews as victims. With three of the film's "terrorists" still alive, perhaps it is time for the documentary to be shown again in France.

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

Mosco Boucault's film "Terrorists in Retirement" provoked a scandal 16 years ago when it was initially banned from French television, and it is not hard to see why. The documentary, which is having its belated American theatrical debut today at the Film Forum, is a scathing if minor footnote to "The Sorrow and the Pity," Marcel Ophuls's 1971 epic expos™ of French collaboration with the Nazis, which itself was banned from French television (for 10 years).

	Jacques Farber, who fought with other immigrants in the French Resistance, reminisces in "Terrorists in Retirement." (Mosco Boucault)

"Terrorists in Retirement" lacks the breadth of its devastating forerunner, and except for one horrifying description of torture, most of its witness accounts of wartime events are skimpier and less dramatic. Yet the film still succeeds in removing another chip from whatever remains of the crumbling national myth (discredited by "The Sorrow and the Pity") of heroic French solidarity in fighting the Nazi occupation.

The film presents a group portrait of several surviving members of the immigrant, mostly Jewish arm of the French Resistance. It focuses on the recollections of a handful of stateless partisans who carried out some of the group's most dangerous missions during the occupation but who, because of their backgrounds, never received recognition. The movie shows how they were betrayed by their Communist leaders for reasons of political expediency, national image, and anti-Semitism.

Beginning in 1943, the Communist Party began deliberately dispatching the partisans on missions that their Communist leaders knew would lead to their arrest and probable execution. Their betrayal came to light that year when Missak Manouchian, the immigrants' militant Armenian leader, was arrested and later executed with 22 other partisans. The film offers conflicting speculations (including the testimony of Manouchian's widow) as to what actually happened. Eventually almost all of the group's 200 members were rounded up and executed.

The Nazis claimed all along that the Resistance was really a Judeo-Communist plot. After the executions, they circulated a poster denouncing the immigrants as "Jewish, Armenian and other stateless terrorists," which helped further separate them in the official record from the true (French-born) heroes of the Resistance.

Most of the men interviewed for "Terrorists in Retirement" were in their 60's and 70's when the film was made and lived inconspicuously in the 11th arrondissement in eastern Paris, where they worked as tailors. Refugees from Central and Eastern Europe who had fled Nazi oppression to settle in Paris in the late 1930's and early 40's, they had less to lose than their French counterparts and were more willing to risk their lives.

The film follows several of these men to sites where they committed terrorist acts four decades earlier and has them re-enact those events, which some do with a swaggering cloak-and-dagger zest. One man demonstrates how easy it was to assemble a pipe bomb (the movie bleeps the names of the incendiary ingredients). Wielding such weapons was extremely risky, since they detonated only seconds after they were tossed. As these men reminisce about the war and revisit their past, traces of their youthful ferocity bubble up along with a simmering rage and sorrow at the destruction of their families by the Nazis.

As disquieting as its message may be, "Terrorists in Retirement" is not a gripping movie, and it is bogged down by the inevitable and necessary historical minutiae. The scenes of these former partisans re-enacting their deeds are crudely filmed, not very dramatic, and occasionally silly-looking. At the same time, the sight of these unsung heroes with their bitter memories bent over their sewing machines is inescapably poignant.

"Terrorists in Retirement" is an uncomfortable reminder that as much as we would like to believe that history is written in stone, it is never really settled. As long as there are survivors to tell their stories, history remains unfinished business. And even then, memories can fail, stories, theories and agendas clash. The most we can hope for is a reasonable approximation of the truth.

TERRORISTS IN RETIREMENT Directed by Mosco Boucault; in French, with English subtitles; directors of photography, Jean Orjollet and Philippe Rousselot; edited by Christiane Lehérissey; music by Jean Schwarz. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, South Village. Running time: 84 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Simone Signoret and Gérard Desarthe (narrators).

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company