SOUVENIR
A film review by Jeff Meyer
Copyright 1988 Jeff Meyer
SOUVENIR (Great Britain, 1987)
Director: Geoffrey Reeve
Screenwriter: Paul Wheeler
Cast: Christopher Plummer, Catherine Hicks, Michael Lonsdale,
Christopher Cazenove
If I had to pick a film from this year's festival that could cause some real controversy when it's released, SOUVENIR would would be right up there. Not that it works at being controversial -- first and foremost, it is a character drama -- but it also takes on the emotional issue of guilt, and assigning guilt, in the aftermath of a war. Christopher Plummer plays Ernst Kestner, a widowed grocer who has lived in America since 1950. In 1944, he was with the German army during their occupation of a small French village, where he fell in love with a local French girl. He was shipped out without seeing here again, and has remembers his time with her very romantically. After retiring, he decides to visit the village again, to remind him of his time with her and to find out if she is still alive. His estranged daughter (Hicks) decides to accompany him, and his cold reserve to her begins to melt as they approach the village.
Kestner is in for a massive shock. The village is much as he remembered it, but it has become a monument to the Nazi war atrocities; in reprisal for Resistance attacks, the local Gestapo rounded up the women and children of the village and locked them in the town church. They then burned it to the ground. Included in those who were burned to death was Kestner's lover. It is clear that Kestner did not know she had died in the fire, but we are left wondering how much *did* he know? And is he to blame? That question is constantly left hanging to the audience, to Kestner's daughter, and to Kestner himself. To add further fuel to the moral controversy, the town's mayor (Lonsdale), a famed resistance fighter who rose to political celebrity with his slogan to "never forget", is very close to attaining a position of national prominence, and his previous statements on keeping the memories of World War II alive are in conflict with his plans for European unity. Towards the end of the film, Kestner becomes a catalyst for the mayor's political decision, and Lonsdale reveals information which complicates the web of guilt even further.
I came out of this movie trying to figure out whether the director was trying to make a specific statement with this film, i.e., whether he favored either side of the argument. After a month of contemplation, I'd have to say no -- he's just skillful enough to to outline the best arguments on either side, and let it play from there. While it works as character drama, it's equally good at stimulating ideas and outlining conflicts, and I'll be interested to hear what others think of it.
Christopher Plummer gets his best role in years; however, I keep wondering what other actors could have done with Kestner. With Plummer, you get the feeling that he's pushing himself to the limit with any kind of emotion (Kestner is a very "frigid" person, so this seems appropriate), but I felt like I still was missing a large piece of his character by the end of the film. Hicks and Cazenove (as a hack reporter who stumbles on Kestner and daughter and sees a story in it), while doing nothing particularly noteworthy in the acting category, keep the film from grinding under its own angst every twenty minutes with their back-and-forth pleasantries. Lonsdale (who I've only seen in DAY OF THE JACKAL and as Drax in MOONRAKER) is perfect as the savvy and very intelligent mayor of the village.
Nothing spectacular, but a very involving little film from beginning to end. Certainly food for thought (and arguments) for those of a political bent. Recommended for a Tuesday night viewing with coffee afterwards.
Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer
INTERNET: moriarty@tc.fluke.COM
Manual UUCP: {uw-beaver, sun, microsoft}!fluke!moriarty
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews