Christmas in the Trenches...with George

Joyeux Noël (2005)directed by Christian Carion

Taking a break from flawed vampire films, here’s a film about real death and, more importantly, real life.
Joyeux Noël is a film about the Christmas Truce of 1914, a historical oddity of the First World War that has become the stuff of legend, recounted in many a song and story. As the last few veterans of the War to End All Wars finally pass from this earth, it’s a good time to think about that war and Christian Carion has made a beautiful gem of a film that is filled with humanity—the good kind of humanity, not that faux pap that gets passed off as a “message” or some uplifting movie about a budding sociopath who finds meaning in life by putting his hand in bears’ mouths. This is a film about peace on earth and good will to all mankind. (Things that are worth believing in.) It’s the kind of film that reminds you there’s something good left in people and a reminder that despite the worst inclinations of some religious people, religion has long given us the language to do good in this world. In other words, it’s a true Christmas film.
The credits open with a series of prewar postcards, paintings and pictures from the summer of 1914. The peace and tranquility, the enjoyment of life represented in those pictures, are rendered more poignant because we know what comes at the end of that summer, the ghosts of which continue to haunt us all a century later. One of the last pictures is of some French boys in uniform. Make no mistake here, I’m not saying that they’re young, I mean they are literally children in uniform and it’s a kind of picture that’s always cute until you can look back and think about how many of those boys in uniform never grew up to become men out of uniform.

And we go from charming kids in uniform to a series of poems being read in classrooms by patriotic youth.
If children are our future, then think about what your future is like when you spit out the following:

Child upon these maps do heed
This black stain to be effaced
Omitting it, you would proceed
Yet better it in red to trace
Later whatever may come to pass
Promise there to go you must
To fetch the Children of Alsace
Reaching out their arms to us
May in our fondest France
Hope’s green saplings branch
And in you, dear child, flower
Grow, grow, France awaits its hour.

Well, there’s nothing more patriotic than teaching your kids to long for a land that is occupied by your neighbors, after all. Change the places and the flags and you can tell the story of mankind in that poem.
Meanwhile, here’s what the juth of Germany has to say:

We have one and only enemy
Who digs the grave of Germany
Its heart replete with hatred, gall and envy
We have one and only enemy
The villain raises its murderous hand
Its race, you know, is England

Hmmm. Not as good in translation as the tadpole poem that preceded it, and I like how it completely dismisses France or Russia or any other rival. That certainly says a lot about the real rivalries that led to WWI. Finally, we transition to the Brit kid’s classroom and he’s not singing Pink Floyd:

To rid the map of every trace
of Germany and of the Hun
We must exterminate that race
We must not leave a single one
Heed not their children’s cries
Best slay them now, the women, too
Or else someday again they’ll rise
Which, if they’re dead, they cannot do.

No dark sarcasm in the classroom, indeed. On board for the hatemobile yet? Don’t even try to pretend that it’s just Ann Coulter who would say something like this. Plenty of normal folks have said something like it at some point or another in recent years. Plenty of folks on all sides of every conflict have taken things to this level. And, of course, I suppose if the British had exterminated the Germans in World War I there never would have been a World War II, at least not one with Germany. Of course, the trouble with that kind of logic is that it really does work both ways. Nobody has a monopoly on extermination, just like nobody’s got a monopoly on justice or truth or hate or viciousness or ruthlessness.

Finally we get a sweeping vista of Scotland that leads us to a church where Father Palmer (Gary Lewis) is doing some remodeling work with his young parishioners who are eager to get some excitement that will get them out of their dead end lives. (Well, there’s nothing like dying in Flanders to get you out of living in the middle of nowhere, Scotland.) So, William (Robin Laing) and his little brother (Steven Robertson) and their priest all go to war together just like everybody else in Europe. That’s some piss-poor peer pressure. To be fair, Carion stacks the deck against the idea of adventure by using some really brilliant cinematography to make the hills and mountains look as beautiful as they can ever be. You might understand the desire to get the hell out of Dodge if you filmed it for twenty rainy days in a row and showed the wee village where these kids lived, most likely in a life that only we, in retrospect, can describe as idyllic. Besides, they figured, like we always do, that they’d be home by Christmas.

Meanwhile back in Germany the renowned tenor Nikolaus Sprink (Benno Fürmann) and his Danish wife Anna Sörensen (Diane Kruger) are interrupted by the Kaiser’s declaration of war which is read out to the audience immediately because the punctual Prussians just couldn’t he wait ‘til intermission.

These are grave times for Germany. Our country is under siege. The sword is being forced into our hand. I hope…that with the help of God we will wield the sword in a manner that we can put it back in the scabbard with honor.

Yeah, good luck with that Kaiser Willy. Seriously, though. At least the sentiment expressed in the Kaiser’s statement is civilized, even if the reality is harder to square with the high-minded language. That’s a damned sight better than saying right at the outset that honor is for losers and the only thing that counts is winning no matter what you have to do to get there. But hey, as long as you win no one’s going to care about a few villages in the middle of nowhere with no one in them, right?
So the great Sprink is called up to fight the Kaiser’s war like everybody else. (You know, there’s something democratizing about a war where opera singers and chemists have to be riflemen.)

Finally, we get to see our main French character, a young officer named Audebert (Guillaume Canet) who is about to lead a charge into the German line. It’s the early part of the war, so the fighting is practically out in the open. This is the only combat sequence in the film and it’s mercifully shorter than the war itself and brutal enough to get the point across. The French don’t get far. The Scots on their wing don’t get far either and William, with his dying breath, tells his brother to get the hell out of the war so that their mother will have a son left. (And then his body is left behind in no-man’s land.) Audebert loses a pile of his men and when he finally calls off the attack he has to face his General (Bernard Le Coq) who upbraids him for not pressing the attack. And, of course, to push the poignancy further, the Major General is his dad and his pregnant wife is in German occupied Lens. That’s a lot of issues, and it takes into some territory that in the wrong hands would be cheap melodrama. It is to the credit of Carion that he can make that story work.

Meanwhile, Diane Kruger is busy going over the heads of several generals and getting permission for her husband to get one night away from the trenches to give a command performance duet with her for the Crown Prince (Thomas Schmauser) and a different kind of command performance duet with her as a Christmas bonus. (Fun in a chateau ensues. The disgruntled French owners of the chateau are brilliantly portrayed by Michel Serrault and Suzanne Flon. )

General: You’ll only see him one night. What’s the point of that?
Anna: It’ll be much more than one night. Our minutes are longer than yours.

So, it all starts when the Kaiser decides to bring a little Christmas cheer to the troops in the form of 100,000 Christmas trees for the trenches. (One tree every 5 metres, according to the German officers’ calculations.)
With all those trees on the trenches who could fail to get filled with all kinds of Christmas cheer? If only the Kaiser had filled the trenches with a hundred million gallons of eggnog maybe the war would have ended by New Year’s Day.

In mediocre hands the film that follows would be a sugary sequence of clichés and sentimentalities like some sort of Hallmark Armistice Day Greeting Card Special. Fortunately, Carion is a better director than that and his actors are better than that—much better than that.

To some extent all period films are exercises in some form of nostalgia, but Joyeux Noël is an exercise in nostalgia for several specific things. It represents a nostalgia for a time when it was conceivable for something like the Christmas Truce to occur, nostalgia for a war fought for purely national interests that seemed to become ridiculous once men were locked in a stalemated front in trenches filled with Christmas trees and men who just stopped caring about gaining an inch or two of territory. By the end of the film the world that made the Christmas Truce possible is already on its way out as the reasons for wars become more ideological, and thus more irreconcilable. The Second World War and most of the wars since across the world (outside of some charming rarities like The Falklands War) have included irreconcilable elements of religion, ideology, racism and extermination that don’t allow for the kind of fellowship across the lines that would lead to mass fraternization. Sure, we sometimes remember that our enemies are, in fact, human beings, but more often than not we march into battle with some version of the children’s poetry from the top of this film going through our heads.

It’s also a nostalgia for an enemy like the Kaiser’s Germany, one where you can have a German Jewish officer such as our Horstmayer (Daniel Brühl) with a French wife. Sorry for the spoiler, but it’s the kind of thing that is only remarkable in retrospect with the gulf of Nazi Germany lying between the present and the mythic (more innocent) past. You really don’t know how good you’ve got it until you get something far worse. All the talk about exterminating the “murderous Huns” may have become a self-fulfilling nightmare. Call your enemy murderous sociopaths long enough (without cause) and maybe they’ll become the monsters you invented in your propaganda posters.

For my part, I have to admit a certain nostalgia for the leveling effect of the trenches that were filled with universally mobilized conscripts, including German tenors. And is it nostalgia or just a form of wish-fulfillment when the phrase “I have lice” is followed by Diane Kruger making love with you? Maybe it’s the war and the imminent possibility of death, or maybe it’s true love.

The larger case of wish-fulfillment is how once the soldiers have fraternized they become increasingly reluctant to kill their new friends from the other side. Granted, the soldiers involved do insist that they wouldn’t have extended that courtesy to a different unit (strangers, as it were) but you get the feeling some of them have lost all taste for war and killing.

Of course, it’s easy enough to look through rose-colored gas mask lenses at a simpler time. In hindsight, we look at the terrible result of the 20th century wars of ideology (fascism, communism, post-modernism) and look forward to the 21st centuries wars of religion and then we look back at an innocent time when people only fought for silly things like flags and countries and languages and empires and we have a nostalgia for it, in part, because we think those things are silly now, in retrospect. But then, we should remember that Europe, having worn itself out with its own wars of religion decided to put aside silly things like that in favor of nations and empires and languages and races and they must have laughed about anyone who would kill each other over something as dumb as religion while killing each other over their giant games of capture the pretty flag. See, people were quite willing to kill and die over nations and empires before and after the Christmas Truce and while all the different reasons for war are mostly behavior that is learned (and can thus be unlearned, or abandoned by jaded veterans) it doesn’t make it any less serious in its own time.

That doesn’t make it any easier when we have to watch the fraternizing soldiers meet their reckonings. The Scot officer Gordon (Alex Ferns) is given a serious upbraiding by his uptight commander and his men are ordered to shoot at some poor German bastard running through no-man’s land. (They all refuse except for our young Scot with the dead brother, who finally takes the shot, because his brother’s death has turned him into a cold psychopathic killer.) The tragic irony, of course, is that the German wasn’t a German but the hapless feline-loving coffee addict Ponchel (Dany Boon) the French soldier who just wanted to have coffee on the other side of the lines with his mother one more time like he used to.

The priest Palmer, meanwhile, is given a chilling lesson in religion by his Bishop (the brilliant Ian Richardson) as he indoctrinates the newer (younger) soldiers that are replacing the fraternizers. The following speech is apparently paraphrased from an actual sermon by an English Archbishop.

Christ our Lord said ‘Think not that I come to bring peace on earth. I come not to bring peace, but a sword.’ The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. Well, my brethren, the Sword of the Lord is in your hands. You are the very defenders of civilization itself. The forces of good against the forces of evil; for this war is indeed a crusade! A holy war to save the freedom of the world. In truth, I tell you the Germans do not act like us, neither do they think like us, for they are not like us Children of God. Are those who shell cities populated only by civilians the Children of God? Are those who advance armed hiding behind women and children the Children of God? With God’s help, you must kill the German, good or bad, young or old. Kill every one of them so that it won’t have to be done again. The Lord be with you.

To be fair, it did have to be done again, so maybe the Bishop is right. But I don’t think so. Because, see, when you call for the extermination of a people they tend to close ranks, and even if it doesn’t happen, they remember it. And maybe they prepare. And maybe they get paranoid. And maybe they rally behind someone who promises to exterminate them, before they exterminate us. You really have to mind your language. You can call World War One a lot of things, but a moral crusade against evil it was not. But then, maybe that’s just the retrospective talking again.
So, anyhow, Christianity is a religion of peace, right? That's what I'm seeing in the passage above, right?
Religion of peace? Maybe. Sometimes. When it’s in the hands of the priest in the trenches, sure. But in the hands of Bishop Bloodthirsty?
I wonder why Pope Benedict didn’t quote this little gem at Regensburg? Huh, Benny? You packing peace, or are you packing the sword?


So, about now you’re thinking this is the most depressing Christmas movie since It’s a Wonderful Life, right? Well, it does get better.

Audebert has the climactic showdown with his father with all the angst of a father/son “why don’t you love me, daddy?”/”I always loved you, son” drama. The father is sending the son to Verdun and he and his men will be sworn to secrecy because nobody would believe or understand what the heck happened at Christmas.

Son: The country? What does it know of what we suffer here? Of what we do without complaint? Let me tell you, I felt closer to the Germans than to those who cry “Kill the Krauts!” before their stuffed turkey!
Father: You’re talking nonsense.
Son: No, you’re just not living the same war as me or as those on the other side.
Father: Today I’m fighting a war where the shovel outweighs the rifle, in which people swap addresses with the enemy to meet when it’s all over. Plus the cat we found with the note from the Germans, “Good luck, comrades.” I was ordered to arrest the cat for high treason.

See, it’s got jokes. And the son has found out during all this fraternizing that his wife gave birth and the old general is a grandfather. The old man says “Let’s try and survive this war for him.” Survival. That’s what it’s all about. It’s what gets George Bailey through the rough patches. We do what we can to survive the troubles so that we can (maybe) leave something better for the next generation. See, a hopeful Christmas message.

And if that’s not enough for you, then maybe this is: The Crown Prince tells the German fraternizers that their punishment is to ride a sealed train across Germany to the Eastern front where they can freeze their asses off fighting Russians and to drive his point home he takes a harmonica from one of the soldiers and crushes it. (What a waste.) So, the train (with graffiti on it reading ‘Tannenberg’, for you fans of Grand Illusion) rolls away into the distance, but the Germans start singing the song that the Scots were singing on Christmas. Let them sing.
See, another hopeful Christmas message.

Okay, I can see this is a hard sell for a Christmas movie and a bit too uplifting and peaceful for a war movie. But maybe something about that sermon in no-man’s land got to me. See, what’s so damn funny about peace, love and understanding? Isn’t that what Christmas is all about? And maybe it’s not so bad to be reminded of that every so often. Isn’t that what art was supposed to be about? Maybe you’d rather bury your head in the sand, maybe you’d rather not deal with war or discomfort during Christmas (or any other time of the year). But maybe it’s worth a little discomfort to be reminded of what’s important in life (isn’t it, Mr. Scrooge?) and it doesn’t matter if it’s Christmas or July, a little bit of humanity can make your life better.

Joyeux Noël, y’all.

Commentary with Director Christian Carion
“We don’t have to give a lesson to Islam because in 1914 we did the same thing.”

Sure, his French accent is sometimes thick and sometimes all the peace talk gets a bit preachy, but he does have some good anecdotes.

For instance, of note to cinephiles will be the fact that some of the pictures in the opening montage were by the Lumiere Brothers. (Yes, those Lumieres.)
If you’re planning a vacation to the Scottish highlands go in August and it might look like it did when they filmed there.
Diane Kruger’s singing was done by Natalie Dessay. If you liked it, you should check out Dessay’s other works. She is wonderful.
“I decided to put a woman into the film because I didn’t want to spend three month shooting only men in uniform.” Hey, if Wolfgang Petersen had thought of that Das Boot would have been hilarious.
For sports fans, the Germans beat the Scots 3-2 in the football match in no-man’s land.
The cat story and the General in the latrine story are based on real stories.

Joyeux Noël is part of a small movement to commemorate the Christmas Truce and keep the memory of it alive in some way.

Interview with Christian Carion

It’s an interesting interview but I’ll have to admit it took me a good couple of minutes of listening to it en Français before I realized that I could go back and turn on the subtitles for it.

Worst revelation of this interview: The French shot a cat in 1915 for espionage and treason.
The Bishop’s speech at the end is from 1915 in Westminster Abbey. In the words of Christian Carion: ‘There is nothing that justifies this kind of language from a man of God.’


Trailers

One thing I love about Independent films is that they often come bundled with giant collections of trailers

1. Curse of the Golden Flower (2006)
A great trailer. Chow Yun-Fat and Gong Li in a costume action epic. The trailer itself makes a great short film. Wish I had been able to see this on a big screen.
2. Driving Lessons (2006)
Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), Mrs. Weasley (Julie Walters) and Laura Linney all together in a coming of age comedy together. How grand.
3. The Italian (2005)
A sad Russian kid trying to find his mother after being put up for adoption. Get the handkerchiefs and a bottle of Stoli ready for this one.
4. Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006)
I can only imagine this will now be followed with a sequel titled Who Killed GM? At least this film looks better than an episode of 60 minutes. (Star studded cast includes Ed Begley, Jr. and it’s narrated by Martin Sheen.)
5. Why We Fight? (2005)
An important documentary by Eugene Jarecki about the idea of American Empire. Looks sure to get some good arguments started. If Noam Chomsky’s not in it, we can take it seriously. (A different kind of star-studded cast.)
6. The Passenger (1975)
Michelangelo Antonioni, Jack Nicholson, Maria Schneider. If only the creepy voiceover guy would stop talking about Last Tango in Paris.
7. The White Countess (2005)
Natasha Richardson, Ralph Fiennes. In China. Directed by James Ivory, written by Kazuo Ishiguro. Lush.
8. The Triplets of Belleville (2003)
How did they make even the trailer seem a little bit creepy? Love the animation and music.
9. Bon Voyage (2003)
An action comedy period piece—in French. Isabelle Adjani, Gerard Depardieu, Virginie Ledoyen, Peter Coyote. Must-see.
10. Look at Me (2004)
Quirky father/daughter relationship comedy…in French, if you can believe it. Looks like it might have some potential.
11. The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005)
Even the trailer for this film about a musical prodigy with psychological problems is melancholy.
12. The Best of World War II Movies
(Sahara, Bridge on the River Kwai, Hellcats of the Navy, Anzio, The Caine Mutiny, King Rat, The Guns of Navarone, From Here to Eternity, Hope & Glory, Bitter Victory, The Odessa File)
It’s like watching one of those Academy Award montage sequences. Great for a really brief game of spot your favorite movie moments or a good idea for a home film festival.
13. The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)
I guess this is in the general spirit of uplift of this DVD.
14. The Holiday (2006)
Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet are unlucky in love so they switch houses to get some new scenery and so Cameron Diaz meets Jude Law and Kate Winslet meets Jack Black. Yeah, that seems fair.