World War I was considered “The Great War,” with a cost of
more than 14 million military and civilian lives, but it remains one of the
more puzzling modern-day conflicts, lacking the obvious good vs. evil
distinction attendant to its horrifying sequel. It’s this ambiguousness that no
doubt led to the Christmas Truce of 1914, during which pockets of French,
German, and British soldiers entrenched along the Western Front temporarily
laid down their arms to observe the birth of Christ with each other. And that
temporary cease-fire has, in turn, inspired the
Oscar-nominated Joyeux Noรซl, a tearjerking
meditation on the peculiar practice of solving problems by slaughtering fellow
human beings.
Writer-director Christian Carion
uses an international cast to bring this story to life, opening Joyeux Noรซl with word of the war arriving in
various locales. There’s a pair of Scottish brothers eager to ditch their tiny
town and do battle with foreigners, as well as Father Palmer (Gary Lewis, the
dad in Billy Elliot), their solemn
parish priest, who enlists as a stretcher-bearer. We also meet a German opera
singer named Sprink (BennoFรผrmann, from Tom Tykwer’sThe Princess and the Warrior) and the
soprano he must leave behind (Diane Krรผger, National Treasure), a nervous French
lieutenant named Audebert (Guillaume Canet, Love Me If You
Dare), and Horstmayer (Daniel Brรผhl,
Ladies in Lavender), a seemingly
sourpuss German officer. These individuals will collide on the field of battle,
though not in the manner they might have anticipated.
A stirring intertrench jam session
on “Silent Night” gives Sprink the courage to venture
forth into No Man’s Land, inspiring the Allied forces to suggest a respite from
the war, complete with Christmas mass, a little soccer, and a chance to bury
the frozen dead. And now that the adversary has a face, the tentative yet
welcome truce gets prolonged in surprising ways. Naturally, once the
out-of-touch superiors (including the formidable Ian Richardson as a jingoistic
bishop) get wind of this, they consider the good will toward men to be high
treason, though one soldier is accurate when he observes, “To die tomorrow is
even more absurd than yesterday.”
Krรผger, appearing up until now as
little more than exotic arm candy (the German model was also the face that
launched a thousand ships in the lackluster Troy),
takes advantage of this opportunity to actually act, aided, no doubt, by the
fact that she’s working in her native language. An American interpretation of
this episode probably would have found everyone speaking accented English, but Carion allows the three sides to converse in their mother
tongues, while they occasionally employ English and French to communicate with
their opponents.
Carion
elicits thoughtful performances from most of his cast (except perhaps the
overacting Fรผrmann), including Palmer as the priest
embracing his natural inclination to minister to all of God’s creatures, as
well as a quick cameo from French great Michel Serrault
(La Cage Aux Folles)
as the owner of the occupied land.Joyeux Noรซl‘s broad focus unfortunately doesn’t allow
anything beyond the most cursory character development (the up-and-coming Brรผhl’s character is frustratingly intriguing), though the
Everyman vibe is certainly compatible with the argument that your enemy is
usually just like you.
Joyeux Noรซl‘s script is understandably a little mawkish considering the
subject matter, making the occasional flashes of sarcasm most welcome. (In
response to Horstmayer’s description of life after
occupation, Audebert dryly replies, “You don’t have
to invade Paris to drop ’round for a drink.”) Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s
very perfect A Very Long Engagement is too fresh in the memory to laud the look of Joyeux Noรซl, but the film is resourcefully shot, with the drab colors of
WWI saturating the screen. And the operatic bits are lovely, though the
lip-synching is less than successful.
Joyeux Noรซl did not win the Foreign Film Oscar this year (that honor went
to South Africa’s Tsotsi,
also opening soon at the Little), but it did invoke flashbacks
to France’s 2004 submission, Les Choristes. Both are sappy and heavy-handed, but while Les Choristes made me want to sock every French orphan that crossed my path, Joyeux Noรซl pushed the correct buttons in the
proper order. Or maybe the escalating body count over in the cradle of
civilization has made me particularly mushy. Either way, it’s
April, and I’ve been humming Christmas carols for a couple of days now.
Joyeux Noรซl (PG-13), directed by Christian Carion,
opens Friday, April 7, at the Little Theatres.
This article appears in Apr 5-11, 2006.
