![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Of Wars and Film: Apropos A Very Long Engagement
Between some (business) travelling and other RL stuff, I’m being kept busy these days, but I did find the time to watch A Very Long Engagement in the cinema. To my surprise, being somewhat wary of Jeunet and finding some of the scenes shown in the trailer too cutesy, I liked it. A lot. For starters, it accomplishes that most difficult of goals: how to make a movie in which war plays a central role without making, by sheer cinematic thrill, war look appealing nonetheless – and how to make it without being so tedious that you lose your audience and thus your point.
Now, pro-war films don’t have that problem anyway. Then there is the “war is a regrettable necessity” school of films, under which label I’d put, say, Saving Private Ryan or Lord of the Rings. Then there are films who try to have their cake and eat it. This is best summed up in a scene from Gladiator, in which Our Hero defeats and kills a lot of people in the arena in one scene, then turns and savagely asks his audience whether they liked that. The thrill. Which clearly is also intended to play as meta, addressing not just the Roman audience but the present-day one. To which one critic replied: Well, yes, Ridley, but that was kind of the idea, wasn’t it? Going for an antiwar label but in the process dishing up the fighting thrills is what you can also accuse several of that now seemingly dead subgenre of war movies, the Vietnam film, of. And it’s hard to avoid. But every so often, a film manages to put war at the center, and comes up with the cinematic equivalent of Wilfrid Owen’s poetry.
The first one of these I can think of is All Quiet at the Western Front, by Lewis Milestone, based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque. (Which is to the German literature produced by WWI what Goodbye to all that or Memoirs of an Infantry Officer are to the English.) As I said in an earlier post and a different context, WWI has a very different resonance in collective memory than WWII. Londonkds once pointed out that the appeal of WWII is that it lends itself to the clear-cut Good versus Evil structure beloved by Fantasy (and heck, pretty much every genre on the planet). There is no question who was in the right, who was in the wrong, and whose side one is supposed to root for to win. So a film set in WWII, even if it is of the “regretful necessity” school, never questions the overall enterprise. The first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan might be a graphic illustration of just how horrible war can be, but there is never a question of the fact those American soldiers landing on the beaches of Normandy not having an important task for the greater good to accomplish.
WWI, on the other hand? A bloody mess. Ask anyone what it was about, exactly, and you’ll get either no answer or a dozen different ones. What people do remember is slaughter, slaughter all around, the first use of biochemical weapons (“gas! Gas!”), landscapes looking like craters on the moon, and nothing good accomplished whatsoever. (Well, except for the 1914 Christmas Truce which I don’t think had an equivalent before or after in military history; English, German and French soldiers creating this truce by themselves, with no and sometimes against orders, lasting depending on the unit one to three magical days.) A Very Long Engagement, which is set partly just after the war and partly, in flashbacks, during it, makes that point in its opening scene.
Which is where we meet five soldiers who, some deliberately and some accidentally, have mutilated themselves, and have been condemmed to death for this. They get sent out to the No Man’s Land between the lines. One of the soldiers, Manek, is the fiancé of Mathilde, whose post-war quest for the truth drives the film’s plot, but he remains a cypher. In Hitchcockian terms, he’s the MacGuffin, necessary to get things going but not really important in himself. The other four soldiers and their stories are what we find out about during the course of the film, and Jeunet brings them artfully to life. It reminds me a bit of Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of St. Luis del Rey, in which a monk investigates the death of the five people who were crossing said bridge on the day it broke down, trying to prove that there was a purpose, a sense, a divine plan behind them dying together on that day. In that case, too, the answer to the original question isn’t really what the narrative tells; the lives of the people and what happened to them become the point.
Jeunet cuts between the grey nightmare landscape of WWI and the luminous beautiful French landscape afterwards, though this colour scheme isn’t without compromise, as Mathilde isn’t the only one on a post-war quest. Her dark doppelganger, the whore Tina Lombardi, is assassinating the people responsible for the death of the five, and Tina’s scenes take place in red and brown colours. Her two artful murders are also the only examples of Jeunet playing violent death as a cinematic thrill. In all other cases, whether it’s French soldiers or Germans dying, he gets across the horror of it all without evoking any other feeling than pity and sympathy for the dying. The man Tina was in love with is probably the least sympathetic of the five, but his last message to her, which she receives too late, is one that encompasses the humanistic ethos of the movie: revenge isn’t worth it, murder for any cause isn’t worth it. Live.
The images stay with you. Whether it’s the horrible mooncrater landscape of the past or that same area covered with green plants, bathed in sunlight and ostensibly healed in the present, whether it’s a man covered with the guts of his comrade after a granade attack, or a German woman, looking at Mathilde and signaling her with a slight swipe of a blackboard that she needs to talk to her, whether it’s Mathilde kneeling on front of what is supposed to be her fiancé’s grave, then the camera moving up to reveal the thousands and thousands of graves around her, they stay with you. An excellent film.
***
More Arthur Miller: two tributes, here and here, the second of which sums up one of the things I tried to express towards the end of my post yesterday: Arthur Miller may or may not be the greatest playwright America has produced - Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams both have equal, if not more, claim to that phantom title - but he is certainly the most American of the country's greatest playwrights. He was the moralist of the three, and America, as some recent pollsters rushed to remind us, is a country that likes moralists. The irony, of course, is that Mr. Miller's strongest plays are fired by convictions that assail some of the central ideals enshrined in American culture.
Now, pro-war films don’t have that problem anyway. Then there is the “war is a regrettable necessity” school of films, under which label I’d put, say, Saving Private Ryan or Lord of the Rings. Then there are films who try to have their cake and eat it. This is best summed up in a scene from Gladiator, in which Our Hero defeats and kills a lot of people in the arena in one scene, then turns and savagely asks his audience whether they liked that. The thrill. Which clearly is also intended to play as meta, addressing not just the Roman audience but the present-day one. To which one critic replied: Well, yes, Ridley, but that was kind of the idea, wasn’t it? Going for an antiwar label but in the process dishing up the fighting thrills is what you can also accuse several of that now seemingly dead subgenre of war movies, the Vietnam film, of. And it’s hard to avoid. But every so often, a film manages to put war at the center, and comes up with the cinematic equivalent of Wilfrid Owen’s poetry.
The first one of these I can think of is All Quiet at the Western Front, by Lewis Milestone, based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque. (Which is to the German literature produced by WWI what Goodbye to all that or Memoirs of an Infantry Officer are to the English.) As I said in an earlier post and a different context, WWI has a very different resonance in collective memory than WWII. Londonkds once pointed out that the appeal of WWII is that it lends itself to the clear-cut Good versus Evil structure beloved by Fantasy (and heck, pretty much every genre on the planet). There is no question who was in the right, who was in the wrong, and whose side one is supposed to root for to win. So a film set in WWII, even if it is of the “regretful necessity” school, never questions the overall enterprise. The first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan might be a graphic illustration of just how horrible war can be, but there is never a question of the fact those American soldiers landing on the beaches of Normandy not having an important task for the greater good to accomplish.
WWI, on the other hand? A bloody mess. Ask anyone what it was about, exactly, and you’ll get either no answer or a dozen different ones. What people do remember is slaughter, slaughter all around, the first use of biochemical weapons (“gas! Gas!”), landscapes looking like craters on the moon, and nothing good accomplished whatsoever. (Well, except for the 1914 Christmas Truce which I don’t think had an equivalent before or after in military history; English, German and French soldiers creating this truce by themselves, with no and sometimes against orders, lasting depending on the unit one to three magical days.) A Very Long Engagement, which is set partly just after the war and partly, in flashbacks, during it, makes that point in its opening scene.
Which is where we meet five soldiers who, some deliberately and some accidentally, have mutilated themselves, and have been condemmed to death for this. They get sent out to the No Man’s Land between the lines. One of the soldiers, Manek, is the fiancé of Mathilde, whose post-war quest for the truth drives the film’s plot, but he remains a cypher. In Hitchcockian terms, he’s the MacGuffin, necessary to get things going but not really important in himself. The other four soldiers and their stories are what we find out about during the course of the film, and Jeunet brings them artfully to life. It reminds me a bit of Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of St. Luis del Rey, in which a monk investigates the death of the five people who were crossing said bridge on the day it broke down, trying to prove that there was a purpose, a sense, a divine plan behind them dying together on that day. In that case, too, the answer to the original question isn’t really what the narrative tells; the lives of the people and what happened to them become the point.
Jeunet cuts between the grey nightmare landscape of WWI and the luminous beautiful French landscape afterwards, though this colour scheme isn’t without compromise, as Mathilde isn’t the only one on a post-war quest. Her dark doppelganger, the whore Tina Lombardi, is assassinating the people responsible for the death of the five, and Tina’s scenes take place in red and brown colours. Her two artful murders are also the only examples of Jeunet playing violent death as a cinematic thrill. In all other cases, whether it’s French soldiers or Germans dying, he gets across the horror of it all without evoking any other feeling than pity and sympathy for the dying. The man Tina was in love with is probably the least sympathetic of the five, but his last message to her, which she receives too late, is one that encompasses the humanistic ethos of the movie: revenge isn’t worth it, murder for any cause isn’t worth it. Live.
The images stay with you. Whether it’s the horrible mooncrater landscape of the past or that same area covered with green plants, bathed in sunlight and ostensibly healed in the present, whether it’s a man covered with the guts of his comrade after a granade attack, or a German woman, looking at Mathilde and signaling her with a slight swipe of a blackboard that she needs to talk to her, whether it’s Mathilde kneeling on front of what is supposed to be her fiancé’s grave, then the camera moving up to reveal the thousands and thousands of graves around her, they stay with you. An excellent film.
***
More Arthur Miller: two tributes, here and here, the second of which sums up one of the things I tried to express towards the end of my post yesterday: Arthur Miller may or may not be the greatest playwright America has produced - Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams both have equal, if not more, claim to that phantom title - but he is certainly the most American of the country's greatest playwrights. He was the moralist of the three, and America, as some recent pollsters rushed to remind us, is a country that likes moralists. The irony, of course, is that Mr. Miller's strongest plays are fired by convictions that assail some of the central ideals enshrined in American culture.
no subject
no subject
no subject