LIFE AND NOTHING BUT
A film review by Sandy Grossmann
Copyright 1990 Sandy Grossmann
Director: Bertrand Tavernier Cast: Philippe Noiret, Sabine Azema, Pascal Vignal Screenplay: Jean Cosmos and Bertrand Tavernier
Synopsis: A unique film about resiliency and resolve, set in post-WWI
France in 1920. Philippe Noiret (the lead actor) won a
Cesar, the French equivalent of the Oscar, for his work in
this movie. The story is unusual and the characters
well-developed, but it's unlikely to command a large
audience, so see it before it disappears altogether. In
French, with subtitles.
Major Dellaplane (Philippe Noiret) is the director of the War Casualties Information Bureau. One of his official responsibilities is to match corpses, amnesiacs, and worldly effects with the 350,000 reports of soldiers missing in action (MIA). The other official but secret responsibility is to find a very dead, very unrecognizable, but very French unknown soldier to go under the Arc de Triumphe in Paris.
You might say he doesn't see his job in the same light as his superiors. Methodically, Dellaplane leads the effort of counting corpses, photographing faces, interviewing family members, and collecting identifying information about each missing soldier. He ignores the request for an unknown soldier for as long as possible.
The idea of giving up on identifying any corpse is morally repugnant to Dellaplane. He does what any unwilling bureaucrat would: he stalls for time and impedes "progress". Impatiently, his superior tells him to find a body already and stop sending the horrid body count statistics. His superior wants unidentified corpses exhumed in hopes of finding a suitable candidate. Dellaplane provides Oriental gravediggers who will not touch the dead for religious reasons.
Most of France, it seems, is impatient to bury the 1,500,000 dead along with all the remnants of war. Except, of course, for the families of the 350,000 missing and for the new profiteers of war: the war-memorial sculptors/artisans, the lumber suppliers, the cooks who feed the remaining army, and the private investigators who--for a fee--locate and bundle up the dead.
If this were an American movie, we'd see grim people in a grim landscape. The camera would show us, for example, a close-up of a face edged in tragedy then would shift focus and show us an artistically arranged stack of decomposing bodies. But this isn't an American movie. We see no corpses. Instead of iconic characters whose names might as well be Heartbroken or Disillusioned, we meet villagers and soldiers who simply and anonymously do their jobs of clearing debris and rebuilding the village. They are pragmatic and unsentimental.
We meet two women: Irene (Sabine Azema), the Parisienne daughter-in-law of a senator, and Alice (Pascal Vignal), a local schoolteacher. Irene is looking for her MIA husband, and Alice is looking for her MIA fiancee. Irene seems to be the imperious upperclass type when we first meet her, while Alice seems the impressionable, tenderhearted young thing.
Irene attempts to use her father-in-law's clout and her pointedly superior social position to increase the amount of effort expended in finding her husband. Major Dellaplane is not impressed. He tells Irene that her husband will receive precisely 1/350,000th of his attention. Also, she should harbor no romantic notions that her husband will reappear and be all right, Dellaplane tells her curtly. Even if he is alive, the very fact that he hasn't returned makes it a good thing that he hasn't: he is either dead or might as well be dead.
Alice gets a similar lecture from the Major. Neither lecture has the desired effect, though; both women are determined to find what they're looking for. We begin to see that Irene and Alice share more than a common goal. They share qualities called fortitude and loyalty and perseverance. Much like Dellaplane himself.
We learn about Dellaplane gradually, the way we would in person. He is an intriguing, complex man. An example to the men underneath him, he is courageous in the face of danger, unquestionably willing to work ceaselessly through a crisis, and completely committed to his cause. He is a gentleman. He is also temperamental, abrupt, and boorish.
He has researched Irene's husband, but he doesn't share this information with her until he can produce a definitive answer. During the rest of the film, we watch their relationship change from mutual hostility to mutual respect.
Dellaplane resists the effort to symbolize or glorify the colossal loss of life. To him, such symbolism hides the loss. More important to Dellaplane is to chronicle the deaths as completely as possible so that the business of life can ensue. Every day, civilians gather outside a mined tunnel, hoping to find clues that reveal whether their sons died in there. They cannot go home without knowing. Neither can France heal without this issue put to rest.
Yet the officials over Dellaplane glorify the dead instead of laying them to rest. Villagers attempt to redraw their village boundaries so they can show they had losses. The sculptors delight in the 35,000 villages that each want a monument honoring their dead. Soldiers stand to sing a patriotic song in a surge of national fervor.
The director offers a counterpoint: We see an aunt and uncle enter the mined tunnel in order to identify and claim their nephew. A young soldier accompanies them. When the makeshift casket is opened, the aunt looks in and tilts her head. "He is so thin," she says. The soldier faints; the uncle carries him out. Perhaps nowhere else in the film is the personal reality of war so sharply drawn.
This is an understated piece, done by the same director as A SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY. Tavernier shows us both the consequences of chauvinism and the resilience that allowed France to emerge with such dignity. The warning and the hope, one could say.
-- Sandra J. Grossmann sandyg@sail.labs.tek.com
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