What War May Bring

Introduction

The latest film by French director Claude Lelouch, celebrating his 50th anniversary of film-making, is a rather strange and at times self-indulgent affair. The film appears to be pushed at audiences as a war film, but whilst the main events are set during World War II this can't really be described as a war film in the more traditional sense - despite the inclusion of a few set piece battel scenes, although one of these is quite possibly the lamest version of the Normandy Landings that I've seen to date.

The main protagonist of this story is Ilva Lemoine (Audrey Dana), a beautiful and enigmatic woman who reflects on her turbulent life in war-torn Europe whilst on trial for the murder of her husband. Ilva has had a complicated childhood with her pioneer film-maker father killed in the trenches of World War I just as he receives news of her birth, and after a mishap in Italy her mother hooks up with a projectionist in Paris. This is covered in the rather uneven and narrative heavy opening that also implies that Ilva's mother was at some point a syphilitic prostitute who sold her body to support her family.

As France starts to struggle with the Nazi occupation, Ilva's projectionist step father finds himself under arrest after an act of terrorism at the local railway station that left 2 German's dead. The step father, a member of the Maquis, wasn't caught red-handed in the act but rounded up along with 19 other hostages and threatened with execution if the perpertrators refuse to own up to the act. Ilva heads off to the local German HQ to plead with the local Nazi commanding officer to plead for her step father's life. Ilva is pretty angry with the initial reaction and dismissal of her pleas, but later finds her step father returning him with only a couple of bruises, having been pulled out of the line by a Nazi officer prior to everyone else being executed.

Thus begins a rather complicated life for Ilva as she falls in love with a succession of people, their nationality matching the backdrop of events occuring at the time, but each also bringing tragedy into her life as well as love.

In an almost parallel plotline, Simon (Laurent Couson) is a Jewish pianist who is deported along with his family to a concentration camp and experiences the horrors of the Holocaust first hand. The one thing that saves him is his skill at the piano and once liberated, his guilt at staying alive due only to his expertise tickling the ivory pushes him away from the piano and inspires him to study law, whereupon he eventually becomes Ilva's defence lawyer...

Extras

There's a Making Of featurette that is a combination of interview and behind the scenes footage, although in reality it's more a love-in for LeLouch.

Overall

I'm not really sure about this film. I quite enjoyed watching it but with some reservations, mainly directly from the director himself. He has a grand vision that appears to be about love rather than war, with the latter merely the backdrop to events. I'm ok with that. Where I'm not so forgiving is that this film appears to be almost self-reverential, starting with a written introduction by the director about this being his 43rd film and what he hoped to have achieved across them all. Aside from the war elements, everything revolves around film-making and the cinema, whilst the film is bookended by rather out of place scoring sessions with the film playing on screens in front of an orchestra. On top of this, there's a montage of cinematic images near the climax of the film that must just be from Lelouch own back catalogue. I'm really not so sure what he's attempting with the latter, unless it's just the chance to show off in what is supposedly his final film...

Thematically the film is really about a woman who falls in love rather too quickly and the tragic consequences of this. The style and dialogue almost feels inappropriate for a film set in occupied France that touches on love for the enemy, or collaboration in the eyes of most fellow French citizens. There is an attempt by the Maquis to serve summary justice (interspersed by footage of this happening to real women) but she is quickly saved and this is all summarily glossed over as she moves onto a rather bizarre menage a trois with two American GI's, one a black ex-boxer and the other the white heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, who are best buddies.

Claude Lelouch's 43rd film is filmed well and impresses in part, but in truth, Paul Verhoeven's Black Book did almost the same thing much, much better...