Tag Archives: Bertrand Tavernier

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Bertrand Tavernier’s Capitaine Conan – Captain Conan (1996)

Have you seen Capitaine Conan? You haven’t? Well then I’d like to know why you are sitting here, reading this blog when what you should really do, is chase a copy of this unique and brilliant movie? This is one of the best war movies I have seen in a while. I’m doing pretty bad with movies these days and have found my attention span is quite short but this movie had me glued to the screen. WWI movies tend to be a bit repetitive, it’s either the atrocity of the trenches, facial wounds, the analysis of the shortcomings of the high command or the incredible amount of dead and lost soldiers. All of it worthy themes but done a few times and quite brilliantly too. That’s why it was such a surprise that there is hardly any of this in Capitaine Conan. 

Capitaine Conan is based on the largely autobiographical novel Captain Conan by Roger Vercel who won the prestigious Prix Goncourt for the book. Vercel based the main character on one of his comrades.

The most interesting aspect is that the movie (and the book) takes place on the Bulgarian border where French and English troops fought a guerrilla like war against Germans and Bulgarians. There are trenches but a lot of the combat is hand-to-hand combat, man against man.

The lieutenant Capt Conan is an insubordinate, extremely wild and brutal soldier. But also someone who cherishes camaraderie. Instead of eating with the fellow officers, he rather sits somewhere with the men. He leads a group of 50 men that he calls his wolves. They are all equally fearless, brutal and, as it seems, addicted to violence but also a tight-knit group, ready to do anything for each other. There is nothing they like more than fighting man against man and mostly with knives. Because Conan is highly efficient and can turn around the course of hopeless battles, his superiors let him do as he pleases but when the war ends, things go wrong. His bloodthirsty men are too easily bored. They start to commit one crime after the other. Pillaging, raping, robbery. Conan who calls himself a warrior, as opposed to a soldier, isn’t any better and let’s his men get away with everything. Conan has long-lost his sense of right and wrong and all that he cares about are his men. War has turned him into a brute.

Among this violent crowd is a more gentle lieutenant, who wants to become a school teacher in peace time. If it wasn’t for him, who is appointed as prosecutor, Conan and his men would be court-martialled. The friendship between these two men grows slowly but once it’s established, it is indestructible.

It’s quite difficult to do this movie justice as it is very complex and quite fast-paced. Conan is a fascinating character and the way Tavernier depicts him we can’t help but admire him. In the world of WWI, in which there are so many officers who never dirty their hands but make the most important decisions without having a clue, someone like Conan, with a sense of honour and dignity, despite the brutality, becomes admirable. He is ruthless but he has a sense of loyalty and justice. The problem is, that men like him cannot go back to a normal life, once the war is over. They have gone too far.

After the war has ended, they are boarding a train and sent around without really knowing where they go. They stop in Sofia for a long time and are finally sent to the Russian border to fight the Bolsheviks. The scene in which the general informs them of the Armistice is one of the greatest scenes in any war movie ever. It’s so absurd. We see the guy talk about victory and glory, while the rain is pouring down, half of the men are running away because of diarrhea and the highly decimated band plays an off-key Marseillaise and looks like a bunch of flea-infested hobos.

I really hope I could give a halfway good impression of this wonderful movie and how rich it is. It’s very witty with super fast dialogue that I hope is well captured in the subtitles. I have a French DVD so I turned them off. It’s one of the huge problems of French cinema in translation. French cinema does live to a large extent from the dialogue which is usually fast and a lot of it isn’t translated. This isn’t a comedy but it has a lot of funny elements because it shows how absurd war is and because it juxtaposes many different levels of French society and different French regions.

As I said, the movie is available with English subtitles but the only trailer I found is a French one with Spanish subtitles. It still gives a good impression of the movie.

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Bertrand Tavernier’s La vie et rien d’autre aka Life and nothing but (1989) The Aftermath of WWI

This quiet and beautiful movie deals with the aftermath of WWI in France in a way I haven’t seen before.

Life and nothing but aka La vie et rien d’autre is set in France, in 1920. The landscape is destroyed. The villages are in ruins. 350’000 men are missing. Major Dellaplane (Philippe Noiret) is working in some sort of army hospital trying to find the missing soldiers. He analyses features and descriptions, looks at those who are so badly wounded that nobody would recognize them, looks at those who have gone deaf, blind or crazy and also at dead bodies. He has them drawn and measured and puts their portraits in huge albums. So far he has found maybe 50’000 soldiers but there isn’t a lot of hope of finding the remaining ones.

Into this mess comes Irène de Courtil (Sabine Azéma), the wife of a missing officer and member of the French high society, part of those who are responsible for this monstrous war. Irène is looking for her husband. Not so much, it seems, because she wants to see him again but because she wants to move on. Her memory of him is almost faded and they were not married for very long either. Dellaplane treats her very unkindly and tells her that her husband is only one out of 350 000 missing men. In other words, he couldn’t care less about one individual person.

She leaves the hospital and tries other places but much has changed, addresses do no longer exist. She meets Dellaplane again in various other places.

When she hears that there is a site in which they display the belongings of dead soldiers, she travels there to try to find something that belonged to her probably dead husband. Dellaplane is there as well. Every time they speak, they quarrel and shout at each other but they also start to understand each other’s positions. Dellaplane feels pity and promises her to help her husband’s body.

While this is happening, there is a second story line. General Villerieux has to find bodies of anonymous dead French soldiers. One of them should be picked and buried under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. It proves to be very difficult as there are as many dead German and American soldiers in this region as there are French ones. The earth is saturated with dead bodies. Plus there were the Senegalese troops. Despite their being French, the government doesn’t want to bury an African soldier or one from another colony. As easily as these are ruled out, for obvious reasons, as difficult it is to make a difference between American and French soldiers.

Unknownsoldier paris.jpg

The idea of the tomb for the Unknown Soldier infuriates Dellaplane and he doesn’t help his superior. He thinks it is cynical and belittles the losses. 1’500’000 dead French soldiers shouldn’t be represented by one anonymous figure.

There are other important story lines in the film. One follows a sculptor who is making monuments for the villages. Each and every village wants a monument for their fallen.

La vie et rien d’autre is beautiful but also bleak. It’s raining constantly, there are accidents with mines that go off, the places are swarming with hopeless people looking for their loved ones. Everything is in ruins. Everything seems so senseless. The destruction, the deaths, the suffering.

I liked this movie a great deal. It’s also a touching love story. What I liked best is the fact, that it starts where most other movies end. After we have seen the last dead soldier fall on the battle field, WWI movies usually end.

I recently finished the mini-series ANZACS and watched this right after. I’m glad I did as the contrast is amazing. As much as the Australians, Canadians and Americans sacrificed, they returned to their countries, countries that had not been touched by war. They lost a lot of young men, but they didn’t have to cope with a war-ravaged country and destroyed cities. I think this shouldn’t be forgotten.

Unfortunately there was no English trailer but the French one will also help you decide whether you should track it down or not.