Bertrand Tavernier and the Great War

When, in the late 1980s, the legendary French director Bertrand Tavernier decided to make a film about the cost in lives and suffering of the Great War, he applied to the army for assistance. They told him they couldn’t be involved because they were concentrating on the forthcoming bicentennial of the French Revolution. Tavernier told the story with great amusement when he and Philippe Noiret were interviewed for the special edition of Life and Nothing But (1989). Whatever the merits of a project, nothing can interfere with a bureaucracy’s administrative agenda. Ironically this was one of the subjects of the film.

As Tavernier has described it, he became fascinated by the fact that at the end of the war there were 350,000-odd missing soldiers. Were they found? How? If they were dead, how were they identified? And what about the people who were searching for them? Such a film would be a story of grief, individual tragedies, and the institutional expression of these emotions. Some of its backers feared the film would be depressing, even morbid, but as film lovers around the world were to discover, Life and Nothing But was anything but morbid. Certainly, as Tavernier has said, certain sequences were in part inspired by the rituals of memory and commemoration in John Ford’s films. But these ceremonies are life-affirming.

Why return to a twenty-six-year-old film that at the time received more than adequate recognition? As regular readers of this column may recall, I have tried to review as many of Tavernier’s films as possible. He is, I believe, one of the world’s great directors, and his work enriches our film culture; even when we can see his films only on television and DVD. But so far I have not discussed arguably his finest work to date, Life and Nothing But. It was released before I started writing for Quadrant, but the film is particularly relevant to us now—much more so, I believe, than when it was screening at the Pitt Centre in Sydney in 1990.

Since the first release of Life and Nothing But Australia has been having its own debates about how we should remember the two world wars. Moreover, even though Life and Nothing But had reasonable distribution in 1990, its successor, Tavernier’s Capitaine Conan (1996), was to the best of my recollection screened here only a few times at festivals. This later work is an even darker portrayal of the war and its aftermath and cries out to be reviewed in conjunction with its predecessor in an Australia that has just commemorated the centenary of Gallipoli and will soon be marking the Armistice of 1918.

As with most of Tavernier’s films, Life and Nothing But begins with a mosaic of characters and incidents. He and his regular co-writer Jean Cosmos have little patience with carefully structured exposition scenes. Tavernier prefers to plunge straight in. We open with a bleak seascape. A title tells us it is October 1920, when the French government was planning the burial of the Unknown Soldier. An officer and a nun, both on horseback, gallop along a beach. She is hailed by a distant uniformed man but can’t hear him. The soldier falls from his horse, picks himself up and remounts. He has only one leg—obviously a war wound. Cut to the camera moving in on a well-dressed lady seated in a car. She is Irene de Courtil (played by Sabine Azema) who is searching for her husband, a sergeant who volunteered in 1917. She is directed to a hospital where there is a man who could be the missing sergeant. Meanwhile Alice (Pascal Vignal), first seen biking past Irene’s car, is dismissed from her teaching job when the man she replaced returns from the war. He too is maimed. Alice stays in the area, working at the local inn so she can continue to search for her lost fiancé.

Interwoven with these characters is the quest of Major Delaplane (Philippe Noiret) who has been ordered to identify the missing soldiers. A few details allow us to infer that Delaplane is a maverick who has throughout his career asked uncomfortable questions. He is middle-aged and still a major. His superior officer calls him “Dreyfusard”—shorthand for radical in conservative French military circles at the time. Further details indicate he was a frontline soldier. Delaplane wears the single red ribbon of the Croix de Guerre and is slightly crippled in one arm. When we finally see him in full uniform he is wearing an impressive array of medals. (These in fact belonged to Noiret’s father. Noiret also wore his father’s boots.)

A few brief scenes establish that the major is pursuing his task of identifying the missing with obsessive professionalism. Tavernier fills the Panavision frame with details suggesting a dislocated society. The military headquarters is made up of makeshift offices set up in a theatre. A farmer ploughing a field unearths a live shell. The villagers are sending for help when they hear an explosion. These seemingly random plots and sub-plots come together at the film’s major location around a blocked railway tunnel. An ammunition train was heading through the tunnel, the crew unaware that it had been mined by the Germans. Inevitably there are unidentified bodies at the site. Tables have been set up in a nearby field on which belongings from the bodies have been laid out.

These sequences bring together most of the main threads of the film’s multiple plots. The personal stories, which I won’t spoil by describing for you, have a rich humanity that makes the viewer sympathise with Delaplane’s obsessive quest for exact numbers and Alice’s desperate need to find her fiancé. But the overriding theme is how all these threads portray the devastation of the conflict. The train crashed in the tunnel acts as a powerful emblem of the recent war when the ammunition and gas canisters explode. Delaplane reacts like the frontline officer he had been only a few years earlier. A con man preying on the grieving relatives has been a stretcher-bearer and instantly goes back to his old job, and the soldiers trying to contain the disaster perform admirably under Delaplane’s leadership. Later Irene remarks that it is as though the war is continuing. “No,” he replies, “it was much worse,” and goes on to describe the acres of decaying bodies.

Given this, it seems that as with Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1938), Tavernier based his film on contemporary anecdotes. In fact he and Cosmos created their own stories and characters but with extraordinary fidelity to the reality of the grief and bereavement of the period. A ninety-two-year-old participant told Tavernier that he remembered the tables and many of the details Tavernier and Cosmos imagined. Where the film follows the historical record is with its recreation of the selection of the Unknown Soldier. The ceremony was staged where it had originally taken place in the fortress of Verdun. At the conclusion Delaplane mutters, “All they’ll remember is this one, not all the rest.”

Also accurate is the portrayal of the many war memorials erected in towns all over France. Mercadot, the sculptor, played by Maurice Barrier, rejoices that with Rodin dead he now has as much work as he would have had in the Renaissance. A nice moment has Alice refusing ever to go to the sculptor’s studio. We have no doubt her caution is justified. This is of course black comedy. But there is no disrespect for the universal mourning, which the film portrays so movingly. Mercadot is just human and, as with most of the film’s characters, we like him. Tavernier uses an open style—characters meeting randomly, each with a different but similar mission. When the threads come together in a series of dramatically satisfying resolutions, achieved with only a touch of artifice, they affirm the need for truth and understanding.

Delaplane’s statistics may at first seem absurd, but he is one of Tavernier’s truth-seekers. Only when individuals and society as a whole face the reality about the catastrophes of the Great War can the healing begin. Then you indeed have “life and nothing but”.

The performances have a humanity that equals, perhaps excels, Jean Renoir or John Ford at their best. Certainly Philippe Noiret gives one the great performances of the last century, and he is matched by Sabine Azema and Pascal Vignal plus a vast cast of character actors, all at the top of their game. Visually Tavernier uses his travelling cameras and the Panavision frame to encompass the viewer in a richly detailed “reality”. We are watching a masterpiece.

When Tavernier came to portray the war itself, in Capitaine Conan, he chose a series of out-of-the-way conflicts on the Bulgarian border just before the capitulation in November 1918. While Life and Nothing But is well-researched fiction, Capitaine Conan is essentially a true story. It was adapted from a novel by Roger Vercel that was based on Vercel’s friendship with a commando leader, Jean des Cognets. They appear in the novel and film as Conan (Philippe Torreton) and Norbert (Samuel Le Bihan).

In peacetime Conan has been a draper; but in command of a squad of commandos he kills the enemy with grim relish and without mercy. The film opens with a series of brilliantly staged night battle scenes showing Conan’s men in action. Shot in long takes with hand-held cameras, the sequences have an immediacy that is exciting and disturbing. Another sequence where the commandos are combined with regular troops for the “big push” that ended the war is equally compelling. The brutally effective butchery of the enemy by Conan’s group is deftly contrasted with futile uphill frontal assaults on fixed positions of the regulars ordered by the high command. Tavernier’s portrayal of the end of the war is bitterly ironic. The announcement is read out at a parade in the pouring rain as one soldier after another with “the runs” rush to relieve themselves.

With the war over Conan and his squad’s ferocity in battle becomes dangerous licence. For all the violence of Conan’s tactics, the viewer, like Norbert, admires Conan’s courage and leadership in battle. As Conan defends one peacetime atrocity, his own and his men’s, we become increasingly appalled while never quite losing our liking for the man. The easy audience identification figure is Norbert. He is of the same class as the senior officers and is recruited first as defence counsel. “God forbid I decry your role as defence counsel but I can’t see it performing any useful purpose,” Norbert is told.

Tavernier’s portrayal of these proceedings, which were directed at the men who only weeks before had been fighting for their country, is darkly reminiscent of another great film, Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957). Even forty years after the events depicted in Kubrick’s movie the French government was sensitive about the film’s portrayal of a conscienceless general staff who order impossible attacks and when they don’t succeed shoot soldiers selected at random. Paths of Glory was also based on real incidents and came from Humphrey Cobb’s novel, published in 1935, the year after Roger Vercel’s book appeared.

Tavernier has virtually the same attitude towards the military leadership but does not confine himself to a composite event. Certainly he shows senior officers prepared to shoot a few troops for the sake of morale, exploiting a military justice system that can make anyone guilty. When Norbert becomes a prosecutor—as in real life he takes the position to prevent worse excesses—we become involved in a series of cases as Conan and his men’s sense of entitlement becomes criminal. In the Kubrick film the moral compass is clear. Here Tavernier confronts the viewer with endless moral complexity as Norbert tries to find some kind of justice in a corrupt system.

Again I won’t spoil the film by going into detail. But with great subtlety, through Conan and his men and some other cases, Tavernier explores the effect of war on the men who fight and survive. He saves his greatest irony for last. The French are still involved in a war with the Russian communists. There is an unexpected offensive and Conan leads a counter-attack with men recruited from the military prison.

Capitaine Conan is a richly complex work that illuminates aspects of the Great War that in times of commemoration many prefer to forget. Like Delaplane, Tavernier insists society cannot afford the luxury of evasion.