La Guerre des boutons (2011) - film review

It is 1960, a village in the south of France.  A gang of boys, aged between 7 and 14, led by the intrepid Lebrac, is at war with the children of a neighbouring village, their sworn enemies.  It is a war that has lasted for generations, a war without end and without concession.  To defend their honour and proclaim their loyalty, the boy warriors will do anything to show they are the stronger side - even if it means fighting battles in the nude or admitting a girl (horror!) into their esteemed ranks.  The only thing these brave soldiers fear is to be caught by their parents after a skirmish has left them deprived of buttons and with their clothes in tatters.  In that event, discretion is most definitely the better part of valour...

Isn’t it marvellous?  You wait fifty years for a remake of your favourite classic French film and then, just like a London bus, two come along in the same week...  September 2011 was certainly a boon month for dedicated fans of Yves Robert’s La Guerre des boutons, offering us not one but two completely different remakes of the film within the space of a week - the first directed by Yann Samuell with the same title, the second directed by Christophe Barratier (of Les Choristes fame), distinguishing itself with its boldly imaginative title La Nouvelle guerre des boutons (an obvious misnomer, as it is set nearly 20 years earlier...).  Strictly speaking, neither film is a remake; unable to obtain the rights to Robert’s screenplay, both directors had to come up with their own interpretation of Louis Pergaud’s celebrated 1912 novel, which has recently come into the public domain and has found its way into the French school syllabus.  For the record, Yves Robert’s was not the first adaptation of Pergaud’s novel - director Jacques Daroy has that distinction with his 1937 film La Guerre des gosses (in which actor-singer Charles Aznavour made his screen debut, aged 12).  It is also worth mentioning that in 1994 John Roberts directed an updated English language version, set in Ireland.   It is a measure of how highly regarded Yves Robert’s film is that the other versions seem to have been wiped from our collective consciousness.

Will the two latest versions of La Guerre des boutons stand the test of time, or will they go the way of most remakes, destined to be devoured by the bloated shadow of the original?  Only time will tell.  One thing that can be said about the two 2011 versions is that they both purport to offer something new, rather than just slavishly rehashing what has gone before.  Whereas Barratier sets his film in France at the time of the Nazi occupation (an idea which had been considered by the rival production but hastily discarded as implausible), Samuell opted for the early 1960s (the time when Robert’s film was made), the backdrop of the Algerian War providing a suitable context for a story which examines the innate savagery of man through the seemingly innocent war games enacted by children.  Samuell’s film also has a more noticeable female presence than Robert’s film, introducing an important girl character (Lanterne) and thereby widening the scope of the film so that it can encompass a wider range of themes, including some (female emancipation and sexual awareness in pre-teens) that would have been virtually taboo in Robert’s time.  The anti-war subtext of Pergaud’s novel is still apparent (notably in the now iconic nude battle scene), but is far less effective than in Robert’s film, although by touching on more pertinent contemporary themes the film perhaps has more relevance to today’s audience.   

Having himself grown up in the 1960s in a setting not too dissimilar to that depicted in the film (an attractive Burgundy village), Sammuell has ample opportunity to draw on his own experiences, so the film inevitably has a strong auto-biographical element to it.  The film was shot in one of the most picturesque regions of France, on the border between Limousin and Poitou-Charentes, the natural splendour of the countryside beautifully captured by cinematographer Julien Hirsch, who had previously won a César for his work on Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley (2006).  One of Sammuell’s chief concerns was to make the film feel as authentic as possible, and to that end he employed only non-professional actors for the child roles.  However, to make the film marketable he was obliged to cast established actors (Alain Chabat, Fred Testot and Mathilde Seigner) in the main adult roles.  When it was discovered that two versions of La Guerre des boutons were in production at the same time, the producer of Sammuell’s film (Marc Du Pontavice) was offered a substantial financial incentive to delay its release by twelve months.  Du Pontavice declined the offer.

Like all remakes (or, in this case, a quasi-remake), La Guerre des boutons suffers from being too readily compared with the original film.  Yves Robert’s 1962 film is so fondly regarded that some would consider it sacrilegious to remake it, as pointless as trying to remake Truffaut’s Jules et Jim or Godard’s Le Mépris.  A more serious objection to Sammuell’s film is that it doesn’t go nearly as far as it should to bring the story up to date.  The obvious question is: why not set it in the present time?  Instead, the film succumbs to a prevailing (and worrying) tendency in French cinema today to wallow in rose- (or sepia-) tinted nostalgia, content to impose modern idioms on a naive representation of a past that never was.  Yann Sammuell is perhaps more daring than most in that he attempts to work present-day concerns into the guts of his film instead of merely dusting these over the surface - the real war his film presents is not one between rival gangs of children but rather one between children and their parents, something that today’s audience can readily relate to.  Yet, even though the film does make a spirited attempt to be more than just a whimsical nostalgia fest, it still feels painfully out-of-touch and struggles to be much more than an anodyne piece of family entertainment.  If the film has any charm at all, this is almost entirely down to the engaging presence of so many charismatic and likeable child actors, in particular Tristan Vichard, who snatches our sympathies almost as mercilessly as Martin Lartigue did in the 1962 classic.  Alas, placed in the same tank as Yves Robert’s great shark of a film, this tame little minnow doesn’t really stand much of a chance...

© James Travers 2012

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