La 317e section (1965) - film review

In 1954, at the height of the Indochina War, a French platoon comprising four French soldiers and around forty Laotians is instructed to abandon Luong Ba, an outpost on the border with Laos, and relieve Lao Tsaï, a town 150 kilometres to the south.  The platoon is led by the young lieutenant Torrens and his adjutant, Willsdorff, who served in the German army during the Second World War.  The expedition will last eight days and will end in dismal failure.  Amid the setbacks and personal traumas, Torrens and Willsdorff form a close friendship and learn something about themselves...

Easily one of the greatest of all French war films (second only to Jean Renoir’s La Grande illusion), La 317e section offers an uncompromising account of modern warfare that was almost revolutionary in its day and still manages to be a traumatic viewing experience.  Even in the mid-1960s, a decade after the cessation of France’s military campaign in Indochina, the war remained virtually a taboo subject in the arts.   Pierre Schoendoerffer’s novel La 317e section, based on his personal experiences in the conflict, was something of a sensation when it was published in 1953, and his film adaptation of his novel, which was released the following year, proved to be just as controversial.  Memories of the Algerian War were very fresh in people’s minds at the time, so La 317e section was both politically damaging for the De Gaulle government and favourably received by a nation that had grown weary and cynical of its colonial wars.

La 317e section is a remarkable film for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that it is one of a very small number of films to accurately present the Indochina War.  Like the Nazi Occupation and the war with Algeria, this is one episode of French history which the French (in particular the ruling elite) were keen to forget.  The fact that Schoendoerffer opted for a hyper-realist approach instead of the traditional Hollywood-style action-adventure romp gives the film further power and poignancy.  Far from glamorising warfare, as most filmmakers are apt to do, La 317e section shows the ugly reality of conflict - the physical and mental anguish, the desolation of failure and the naked horror of having to confront one’s own mortality in a hostile environment.  It is also a very humane film, with sympathetic characters who are convincingly drawn - not your familiar action heroes, but ordinary mortals trying to make the best of a bad job.  In an attempt to make the film as authentic as possible, Schoendoerffer shot it entirely on location in Cambodia, forcing his actors and technical crew to live and work together almost as a military unit, under extremely taxing conditions. 

Raoul Coutard’s cinematography not only captures the savage beauty of the location but also gives the film a blistering near-documentary realism.  Particularly harrowing are the battle scenes, which are so convincingly realised that you could easily mistake them for genuine news footage.  The savagery of warfare which the film shows us is set against the friendship that develops between its two principal characters, a young French lieutenant and his battle-hardened adjutant.  These two were played by Jacques Perrin and Bruno Cremer, actors of exceptional talent who were both propelled to stardom through this film (Cremer would later find enduring fame as the definitive Inspector Maigret in a series for French television)..  Perrin and Cremer are such contrasting personalities that the relationship which develops between their characters becomes more compelling than the events happening around them.  Perrin represents the idealist who has yet to fully awaken to the absurdity of warfare and sincerely believes that what he is doing will make the world a better place.  By contrast, Cremer is the veteran who sees war for what it is, a grim but inescapable fact of human experience, to be endured like an illness.  The film’s anti-war subtext is hard to miss but it is handled with such subtlety and intelligence that it leaves a profound and lasting impression.  

La 317e section was awarded the prize for the best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 and, despite the controversial nature of its subject, it proved a surprising success at the French box office, attracting an audience of 1.5 million.   More importantly, by broaching some inconvenient truths about the doomed Indochina adventure (which the Americans were then destined to repeat, on a vaster scale, in their Vietnam War), the film encouraged other independently minded French filmmakers to follow suit and shed some much-needed light on their country’s far from glorious military exploits in North Africa and the Far East.   In this light, it is probably fair to say that La 317e section was one of the most significant French films of the 1960s.

© James Travers 2011

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