Deux amis (1946)
Directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff

Film Review

Inactive throughout the duration of the Second World War, Dimitri Kirsanoff resumed his filmmaking career with this remarkable short film based on Guy de Maupassant's 1883 novella Deux amis.  A Russian émigré, Kirsanoff came to prominence when he started making experimental films in France in the early 1920s, combining Soviet ideas of montage with the 'impressionistic' approach to subjectivity favoured by his avant-garde contemporaries Abel Gance, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein and Marcel L'Herbier.  During this early period, Kirsanoff garnered acclaim for his dazzling shorts Ménilmontant (1926) and Brumes d'automne (1929). But even though he helmed a number of commercial films - Rapt (1934), La Plus belle fille du monde (1938), Le Crâneur (1955), Miss Catastrophe (1957) - he was for the most part a marginal figure, his most inspired work being low budget experimental productions over which he had complete control.

Deux amis is arguably Kirsanoff's most intimate and humane film, one that succinctly encapsulates the futility of war and the cruelty of existence.  It also a meditation on the value of friendship and honour, the two things that most ennoble the human spirit and give meaning to life in a seemingly absurd and barbaric universe.  Kirsanoff eschews the technical artifice of his early experimental films in favour of a more coldly realistic approach which emphasises the warmth of the friendship between the two main protagonists.  The interiors are drab and confined, the exteriors cold and dreary.  The opening shots of a hand reaching for a bird in a cage and dead rats being removed one by one from a platter suggest immediately a hungry, comfortless world in which civilisation is descending into savagery.  Then we notice the unremitting sounds of war in the background - shells exploding like a continuous thunderstorm.

The only thing that comforts us is the sight of two old friends enjoying each other's company and reminiscing on happier days.  With a jolting abruptness the happy reunion turns to tragedy.  Just as the friends are lamenting the folly of a totally pointless war they are captured by Prussian soldiers and there is a clockwork inevitability to what then ensues.  As Morissot's last few minutes of life are played out before us we hear the ticking of clocks that we first heard in his shop at the start of the film.  Are the clockmaker and his friend mere cogs in a cosmic machine or are they free to choose their destiny? - this seems to be the question Kirsanoff wants us to reflect on as the all too predictable outcome unfolds before our eyes.

In a departure from Maupassant's novella, the Prussian officer (Richard Francoeur) is not a soulless barbarian but a strangely ambiguous individual who, when he is first seen, is absorbed in painting a landscape.  He shows little emotion whilst discharging his duties but betrays his humanity in subtle ways, at one point picking up and caressing a small dog.  As he orders his soldiers to execute the two Frenchmen he is no more a villain than the two Frenchmen who had previously yanked fishes out of the river for their supper.  It is just another case of one animal preying on another - or is it?  What prevents everything in creation from being just a clockwork toy is the capability that human beings have for making a moral choice.  Messieurs Morissot and Sauvage submit to death not because they are machines conforming to some hidden law of nature, but because they are free to choose what they believe to be the right outcome.  With astonishing economy, Kirsanoff subverts Maupassant's pessimistic story and gives it an incredible modern resonance, the moral being that of all the forces in nature none is more powerful than the human will.

Film Synopsis

1870, during the Franco-Prussian War.  Paris is under siege and food is so scarce that its inhabitants are forced to eat their household pets and any rats they can catch.  Whilst walking the empty streets, Monsieur Morissot, a middle-aged clockmaker, meets an old friend, Monsieur Sauvage, and the two take a drink together.  Recalling happier times when they used to go fishing, the two men agree to return to their old spot by the river just outside the city.  Whilst fishing, the two friends are reflecting on the barbarity and futility of the war when half a dozen Prussian soldiers appear and herd them at gunpoint into a boat.  They are taken across enemy lines to a Prussian officer, who tells them that he is justified in having them shot as spies.  The officer offers to spare their lives, if they give him the password that will allow them safe passage back into the city...