Life and Nothing But

Philippe Noiret plays a military bureaucrat who is meticulously trying to catalogue the casualties of WWI. He and two women cross paths during the excavation of a train that was buried in a tunnel by German explosives. This would make for a great existential movie, but it's all talk talk talk. The dialogue is endless, and, with the long running time, the whole picture seems that way, too. The film would be much more powerful if it demonstrated its themes more visually. Instead, the emotions come off as somewhat flatter than they deserve to be. The production is also poor; it feels like it was made for television. And the musical score is so weak it takes the film down a peg itself. It's still worth watching, but I think it really could have been a lot better.

Propagandists of war like historian John Keegan lead one to believe that the dead of WWI were properly identified and decorously buried in one piece (as he says, in cemeteries "breathtaking in their beauty"). The haunting image of long rows of white crosses comes to mind. This movie shows a vastly different reality. After he war, besides the official number of a million and a half French dead there were 350,000 missing in action. The protagonist, Major Delaplane (Philippe Noiret) is in charge of the unenviable task of locating (and hopefully identifying) the corpses haphazardly dispersed all over the French countryside. His immediate task as the movie opens is the identification of thousands of soldiers suffocated or buried in a bombed railway tunnel under danger of collapse. This is complicated by the families of the disappeared swarming the excavation site, tying up transport scouring nearby hospitals and trying to get clues from the corpses' personal effects. Delaplane is also tasked with delivering some truly unidentifiable cadavers, one of which is to be buried in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the foot of the the Arc de Triomphe, Among his instructions: avoid Algerian, black or Chinese (actually Vietnamese) corpses.

There are disquieting indications.that the business of cleaning up after the war is beginning to be mixed with selling the next one. Andre Maginot is involved in the search for the unknown corpse (Maginot will be the designer of the famed Maginot Line, that was to make the French-German boundary impregnable but didn't). Marshals and generals bask in glory; one of them, General Cherfils solemnly states "War's devastating allure only appears to be destructive," There are touches of black humor all over; one is about a town that (as all towns) sent soldiers to the front. None were killed, thus there is no pretext for building a memorial and the town fears being accused of collective cowardice and/or lack of patriotism for lack of corpses.

Beside Delaplane. the main characters are two women looking for their missing (and presumed dead) mates. One is the entitled, wealthy Parisian Irene (Sabine Azéma) the other the provincial school teacher Alice (Pascale Vignal). Reluctantly and uneasily the major and Irene build an uneasy relationship that evolves into something like love, although Delaplane seems at the end of his tether and unable to open up.

I saw this movie shortly after its release and recently, and I liked it then and now. It does many things well. The script, by director Bertrand Tavernier and Jean Cosmos is clear, direct and to the point, and in spite of its length no part is superfluous. Direction is fluid and acting first rate. The film carries a special meaning in these times where think tanks and the Pentagon cooly plan for the unthinkable and Hollywood movies glorify war. It delivers an antiwar message as powerful as "All Quiet in the Western Front" or the poetry of Wilfred Owen.

Yes, it's a beautiful film, and Noiret is terrific. But the whole plot is something of a whitewash. The Hollywood romance between two posh people (with all their limbs and apparent sanity) is pretty hard to take.

After the Armistice there were racketeers making masses of money out of the identification and reburial of the dead. The cut-price, short coffin racket was the most notorious. (A contractor offered a cheap bulk price for coffins, which were too short, so that many corpses had to be chopped so that they could fit in.) Then there were the war-memorial rackets. Is there a single beautiful WW1 war memorial ?

A far better film is 'Au revoir là-haut' (See you up there), which, though inevitably not as good as the devastating book, gets down into the corruption that accompanies all wars, invasions, occupations and their aftermaths. This film could have been very good if it had been shot in black and white and been half the length.

Director Bertrand Tavernier dares to show the true futility of warfare and the hypocrisy behind every call to arms by revealing how the so-called Great War (like every other war before or since) didn't end with an armistice, except of course for the dead. Phillipe Noiret stars as a military statistician assigned to account for the missing and identify the deceased; his expertise is sought by two women, strangers to each other but linked by a terrible secret.

Noiret's character is that rarest of silver screen creatures, a middle-aged hero, and of truly heroic (but no less lifelike) proportions: competent and compassionate while at the same time flawed and uncertain. Over the course of his investigation he discovers firsthand the legacy of state-approved wholesale slaughter, and learns that after four years of bloody trench warfare some graves are best left unturned. With delicate insight and strong but subtle irony the film succeeds in putting a human face on the true victims of any war: not just the dead and disabled, but the civilians caught in the crossfire.

This is a fascinating film that tells a story that is unsuspected nowadays: the census of the dead of the 1914-1918 war, the number, the identity of the dead, and as a subplot, the search for the body of what will become the unknown soldier of the Arc De Triomphe. And more generally, the film shows us elements of the immediate aftermath of the war that look very much like the state of war. Something that we are not used to see anymore.

The whole is told from the point of view of three characters: Philippe Noiret, the commander in charge of the census; Sabine Azéma, a rich bourgeois woman who is looking for her missing husband, and Pascale Vignal, a schoolteacher and waitress, who is also looking for her fiancé. Their stories will eventually come together.

We can trust Bertrand Tavernier for the quality of the reconstruction and the atmosphere of this post-war period, not at all brilliant. But the film is exciting, moving and strong, from small elements and small touches, not spectacular, but which produce a whole with a lot of emotions.