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Friday, March 24, 2006
A moving story of peace amid war
Publicizing his film "A Very Long Engagement" in Seattle last year, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet said "the biggest thing in France right now is World War I. No one has cared about it for years, but it's suddenly a national obsession -- especially among young people."
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This may partially explain the success of "Joyeux Noel," an uplifting WWI drama that was nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe and six Cesars, and reportedly has been a box-office phenomenon and something of a cultural event in France.
It's a fictionalized version of a true incident that occurred on the Western Front on Christmas Eve, 1914, in which soldiers of the German, French and British armies declared a joint truce for the holidays, sang carols and fraternized through the night.
The script cuts around a large ensemble of characters in the three armies, but gives the lion's share of its time to a conscripted German opera star (Benno Furmann) and his diva girlfriend (Diane Kruger), whose impromptu duet on the front lines sparks the separate peace.
Frankly, as presented here, the story is somehow not totally believable. And if you dig into the history of the event, you'll find a socialist political motivation among some of the participants that was conveniently left out of director Christian Carion's screenplay.
Even so, the overall saga is moving, the performances are first-rate, the production values (which do not rely on the usual cartoonish CGI effects) are strong, and Carion captures the special insanity of stalemated trench warfare with an unusual horrific flair.
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