Intelligent, well-mounted, and crisply performed, Claude Berri's WWII Resistance tale, Lucie Aubrac, is not unlike the stodgy, conventionally attractive "tradition of quality" films that the young critics-turned-directors rebelled against in the French New Wave. Though hard to fault on any level, it's a work of coldly impersonal craftsmanship, turning a potentially thrilling true story into a film that's merely watchable. Part of the disappointment is that Lucie Aubrac opens with by far its most rousing scene, a suspenseful action setpiece in which underground activist Raymond Aubrac (My Favorite Season's Daniel Auteuil) and a group of fellow Resistance fighters attempt to sabotage a Nazi train. From there, Berri shifts into a plodding history lesson about Aubrac's wife's (Carole Bouquet) courageous efforts to rescue him from a Gestapo prison, where he's sentenced to die for war crimes. Part love story, part patriotic tribute to French bravery during the war, Lucie Aubrac has all the elements of an inspirational melodrama, but suffers from a curious lack of urgency and imagination. In the pivotal title role, former Bond girl Bouquet's remote, unaffected performance belies the real Lucie's reputed intelligence and cunning. Berri, a veteran of popular but undistinguished period pieces such as Jean de Florette and Germinal, is settled too comfortably in his director's chair, unwilling to invest the story with a spark of creative energy or visual imagination. Lucie Aubrac disappears from memory with each passing frame.