La Guerre est déclarée (2011) - film review

Roméo and Juliette are a young couple who are deeply in love.  As soon as they met, at a Paris fair at the start of the 21st century, they knew they were right for one another.  What could be more natural for them than to settle down together and start a family?  The birth of their first child was to be the happiest event of their lives.  But then, eighteen months later, a bombshell lands at their feet.  Young Adam has a brain tumour and may well die before his second birthday.  Roméo and Juliette are far from resigned to the impending tragedy.  They have no intention of giving up their child, the most tangible symbol of their love.  They are determined to fight tooth and nail to save their son.  The war has just begun!

It was in 2003, at about the time that the United States had launched its offensive against Iraq, that actors Valérie Donzelli and Jérémie Elkaïm embarked on their own private war - to save the life of their eighteen-month-old son after he had been diagnosed with cancer.  In her second film, made shortly after her debut feature La Reine des pommes (2009), Donzelli recounts this harrowing period of her life not, as (you would expect) a weepy melodrama, but as the most unlikely concoction of musical, comedy and drama - an alluring cinematic oddity that provides the most brazenly effulgent celebration of love and life.  In a year in which French cinema exhibited an extraordinary diversity of styles and subjects, La Guerre est déclarée stands out as being one of the most original and authentic.

Valérie Donzelli and Jérémie Elkaïm not only wrote the screenplay together (which must have been a challenging experience, to say the least); they also play themselves in the film, as a very modern Romeo and Juliet, along with their angelic eight-year old son Gabriel, whose fight against cancer is at the heart of the drama.  The ordeal of making the film must have been a highly cathartic one - why else would Donzelli and Elkaïm go through the pain of reliving such a difficult period of their lives? - but the film is far from being an object in self-indulgent navel gazing (as happens all too often when inexperienced film directors attempt to tell their own life story).  By drawing heavily on what they lived through, the terrible prospect of losing a child within two years of its birth, Donzelli and Elkaïm deliver not only a powerful message of hope to those who find themselves in a similar predicament, but also one of the most vigorously life-affirming French films in years.

What makes La Guerre est déclarée such a potent piece of cinema is that it takes the most delicate of subjects and approaches it in the least likely manner, even getting us to laugh when it would be far easier for us to shed tears.  Initially, it feels like a gaudily post-modern send up of a Jacques Demy film.  A pair of highly photogenic young people meet, fall in love and look set to live happily ever after.  Then cruel fate intervenes and the sugar-coated romance acquires a more sickly hue, courtesy of a malignant brain tumour.  But instead of plummeting headfirst into maudlin introspection, as we might expect, the film carries on in the same upbeat Demy-esque vein.  Yet, despite the rose-tinted idealism, retro Nouvelle Vague froth and bizarre comic interludes, the bleaker chords can still be heard and we never lose sight of the horrible reality of the situation, of two anxious parents desperately willing their child to survive, against seemingly insuperable odds.

La Guerre est déclarée is audacious both in its choice of subject and also in the way it tackles it.  Jacques Demy is an obvious point of reference, but the film takes just as much creative inspiration from that other great force of the French New Wave, François Truffaut.  This is apparent not only in the use of Truffaut’s familiar trademarks (irises, voiceover and classical music) but in the way the film blithely flouts convention - for example, using humour when you least expect it and thereby evoking a deeper, more truthful emotional response in the spectator.   It is probably because she is telling her own story that Donzelli has the confidence to take risks with her mise-en-scène and forge a whole new way of cinematic storytelling, certain in the knowledge that no matter how far she strays from the tight furrow of convention she will never lose contact with the emotional truth of her story and the traumas that she and her partner have lived through.   Innovative, funny and intensely poignant, La Guerre est déclarée is a film that not only extends our notion of what cinema is - an art-form whose variety and expressive power is a long way from being exhausted - but also leaves us with the reassuring thought that no matter how bleak life gets, there is always a way through.   If two people can go through hell, survive and, seven years later, somehow find what it takes to make a film as vibrant and positive as this, then anything is possible.  Not all wars end badly.

For never was a story of more hope, than this of Juliette and her Roméo...

© James Travers 2012

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