Taking its title from Victor Hugo’s collection of poems, in which the author proposed that there is good and evil in all of us, The Rays and Shadows has been heavily criticised for portraying Nazi collaborators Jean and Corinne Luchaire in a sympathetic light. Yet the film’s pace is so sluggish and performances stubbornly detached, that it is it difficult to feel any emotion, either positive or negative, towards the lead characters despite countless scenes of them coughing up blood and phlegm.  

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Framed by Corinne Luchaire recording her memoirs, The Rays and Shadows flashes back to a few years after the Great War. French journalist Jean Luchaire and German teacher Otto Abetz share the stage preaching pacifism. It is this shared hope for good Franco-German relations that the Nazi’s exploit when they come to power. Ordering Otto to influence and report back on France’s sentiments towards Germany, the Nazi’s later install him as the defeated country’s Reich ambassador. In this role, Otto enlists the services of his old friend Jean to use his newspaper to promote collaboration with the occupying force. Seduced by the lavish lifestyle this opportunity affords him and his actress daughter, Jean willingly becomes a propagandist for the Vichy government whilst both turn a blind eye to Nazi’s atrocities.

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Unlike Schindler’s List, there is no conversion on the road to Damascus for the main protagonist. Jean Luchaire remains at the end of the movie what he was at the start, a conman profiteering off the Nazi’s occupation. His daughter Corinne does have an epiphany of sorts, rejecting her suitor because she believes she doesn’t deserve to be loved. It’s either a realisation of what she has been part of, or an acceptance of her fate.

Certainly enough time of the film’s long duration has been excruciatingly dedicated to her and Jean’s battle with tuberculosis.​​