La Vie et rien d'autre (1989)
Directed by Bertrand Tavernier

Film Review

The killing and the maiming may be over but the pain continues.  As director Bertrand Tavernier shows us in his magnum opus La Vie et rien d'autre, the misery of war does not instantly disappear once the armistice has been signed but it lingers, etched deeply into the consciousness of those who survived the bloodletting, blighting their lives forever.  When it was made, Tavernier's epic drama set in the aftermath of World War One was pretty unique.  It was the first film made in France that dwells on the long-term psychological consequences of a major conflict, and, a remarkably expressive piece of modern cinema, it remains the most authentic and poignant film of this kind.  Despite its controversial subject matter, the film was a major critical and commercial success.  It was nominated for eleven Césars in 1990, winning in the categories of Best Actor (Philippe Noiret) and Best Music (Oswald d'Andrea).  It also took the BAFTA for the Best Foreign language Film that same year.

Four years on, Bertrand Tavernier would return to the battlefields of the First World War with Capitaine Conan (1996) to deliver a terrifyingly vivid account of the impact the war had on those brave young men who were carelessly thrown into the most grotesque and efficient killing machine man has so far devised.  La Vie et rien d'autre is just as effective a condemnation of the war but it concerns itself with the wider consequences - the devastation that it wreaked on the lives of combatants and non-combatants alike for years after the war ended.  It is a subject scarcely commented on, and virtually ignored by cinema altogether, but Tavernier broaches it with the sensitivity, honesty and compassion that have become his hallmark. 
 
The idea for the film came to Tavernier whilst he was reading Didier Daeninckx's 1984 crime novel La Der des ders, about a former poilu  (French squaddie) turned private detective.  Tavernier was struck by an appalling statistic: in 1920 over 350,000 French soldiers were still listed as missing in action after serving in the First World War.  Most of these were likely to be dead, unidentifiable pieces of rotting flesh and bone lying forgotten in some neglected spot on a former battlefield, but for each one of them there was a personal story with great suffering attached.  For each of these missing soldiers there was a wife or a sweetheart, a mother or father who was left clinging to the hope that he might return.  A soldier missing in action is neither dead nor alive - and the fact that there were 350,000 such spectres haunting France in the immediate aftermath of WWI appalled Tavernier, as it should anyone.

Tavernier's starting point was to make a film about war that concerned itself exclusively with life rather than death - hence the title: Life and Nothing But.  It was the most difficult subject for even a director as respected as Tavernier to sell.  At one point, he was offered a bribe by one production company to abandon the project altogether, and yet he persisted, driven by a conviction that here was a story that had to be told - not just about how the Great War impacted on the lives of ordinary people, but how the top brass in the military and government were quick to bury the grim reality of the war and put in its place a romantic fiction that turned it into just another heroic page in the history of France.  Every year on Armistice Day, we remember those who fought and died in the war.  But what about the millions upon millions who lost those nearest to them through the war, the ones whose lives were torn apart by the war - mothers, fathers, wives, fiancées, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters?  Tavernier's film invites us to reflect on these forgotten heroes, those whose suffering and sacrifice the history books do not record and which we can only imagine.

A strain of fierce moral indignation runs through much of Tavernier's work but here, in his most vivid and uncompromising film, he rails with less restraint than usual against the hypocrisy and inhumanity of those who sought to sanitise the war and make it into nothing more than a glorious campaign for the honour of France.  Tavernier makes us feel that Le Tombe du Soldat Inconnu (the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier) is an insult to those many tens of thousands of men who were forgotten, the unknown soldiers who remained unknown - thanks to the indifference of the military and political leaders who did not feel the need for each one of them to be buried with a marker bearing his name.  Surely, this is the least a man should expect if he is ready to offer up his life for his country?   After watching this film, the very idea of 'the Unknown Soldier' strikes you as an abomination.

Tavernier's own feelings are powerfully expressed by the film's central character, Commander Delaplane, played with heartrending depth and conviction by Philippe Noiret (at his most impressive in the seventh of eight films he made with the director).  Delaplane is a seasoned military man charged with gathering the corpses of fallen French soldiers and trying to identify them from their scanty remains.  The soul-destroying nature of the gruesome task is vividly conveyed by Noiret - beneath the tough exterior we glimpse a tender being that is visibly torn between disgust and duty.  Whilst Delaplane is busily engaged in the thankless process of collecting and cataloguing a mountain of data, orders come down from above to find a candidate for the Unknown Soldier (along with instructions to destroy any evidence that might lead to a positive identification of the mythic soldier's identity).  Delaplane finds himself under fire from both his superior officers, who consider him inefficient and disobedient, and the frantically overwrought relatives of missing soldiers.  Surely, life in the trenches was never this bad.

For much of the film Delaplane is adrift in his own personal No Man's Land, caught between those who are desperately seeking closure and those who are intent on ensuring the war goes down in history as a great monument to French military might.  Irène and Alice are two of the many hundreds in the former camp, both drawn to Delaplane's sector by the slender hope that their loved one may be in the area and possibly alive.   Irène is played by Sabine Azéma, who previously featured in Tavernier's Un dimanche à la campagne (1984), Alice by Pascale Vignal, who had her big screen debut in the same film.  Both actresses give extremely convincing performances but Azéma is most effective in getting across that horrible sense of limbo, that feeling of living in a timeless muddle as you await news of great import.  Irène isn't really bothered whether her husband is alive or dead (in fact, it turns out that she scarcely loved him) - she just wants the certainty of knowing which it is, so she can carry on with her life.

There is something about Irène's desperate need to break out of her present impasse that appeals deeply to Delaplane's humanity.  Both bear psychological scars from the war that will endure long after the physical wounds have healed and been forgotten.  They have nothing else in common but this one point of connection is enough to plant the seed of love in both of them.   Under normal circumstances, these solitary individuals would be able to express their feelings openly, and a happy romance would quickly ensure.  But these are not normal circumstance.  Their nascent love is screened from the sun by war's thick shadow and it only grows inwardly, stunted and unseen.  It is as if, by drenching the fields of France with the blood of the innocent, the war has poisoned the essence of life, so that not even love can thrive.

The impact of the war reveals itself in other ways.  So many ordinary people have become inured to the loss of life, the ghastly savagery of the conflict and its attendant privations that they scarcely appear to notice these horrors.  For some, this even becomes a source of amusement.  One French solider exults in the fact that his country sustained far more casualties than any other - even Germany.  At last, France is top of the league in something!   In another scene, it is casually remarked that there have only been two deaths from poison gas, making it a quiet week.  Soldiers singing bawdy songs are automatically classed as priests.  And at a concert, soldiers reinterpret the nightmare of Verdun as a crude piece of comic opera.  It's one way of coping with the terrible reality of the war - to turn it into a cheap piece of vaudeville.  Tavernier was right to inject the occasional shot of humour into his film - without it La Vie est rien d'autre would have been unbearably grim.

The authenticity that Tavernier and Jean Cosmos invest in their screenplay is amplified by Guy-Claude François's remarkable set designs, which provide the film with an astonishingly accurate reconstruction of the period, helped by Bruno de Keyzer's vivid and suitably sombre photography.  Fields still strewn with the detritus of war, buildings crudely appropriated in the most makeshift fashion for other purposes...  There is no sense of permanency, just the impression of a shattered country trying pathetically to emerge from the ruins of a monstrous catastrophe. The recriminations and mourning have yet to come, once the reconstruction is under way.  At the moment, everyone seems to be in a state of confusion, sheep lost in a fog of bewilderment.  As these unfortunates struggle to find their bearings, the ones who created all this mayhem are now busy fabricating the fiction that will make the sacrifice easier to bear.

There have been all too many conflicts since Bertrand Tavernier made this film - maybe this is why it continues to have such a profound resonance.  Wars happen too easily and too often, and once they've had their fill of the killing, those who prosecute them (always in our best interest, of course) are out in force jet-washing the blood off the pavement so we do not see the reality of war.  What these people never seem to understand is that war leaves marks that cannot be easily washed away.  La Vie est rien d'autre is one of cinema's most powerful arguments against war.  It isn't the senseless loss of life and the physical suffering that should make us shun war.  Rather it the greater, longer term costs - the inner wounds that rankle for decades and the stains that demean us.  These should be sufficient to make us mindful of what war really is - the most abject and unpardonable of mankind's failings.  But still the blood sport goes on.

Film Synopsis

France, 1920.  It is two years since the signing of the Armistice that brought an end to the First World War, but the clearing up still continues.  In an area of northern France, Commander Delaplane has his work cut out counting the recovered bodies of fallen soldiers and attempting to identify them from their scant remains.  As he does so, he is beset with appeals from grieving relatives seeking their lost sons whilst orders reach him from his superiors that he must provide a candidate for the honour of The Unknown Soldier.  The nature of his work has made Delaplane indignant, brash and cynical, so when a bourgeois woman named Irène de Courtil turns up in her chauffeur-driven car and tries to badger him into finding her missing husband she gets short shrift.  Realising that her case in not unique, Irène opts to stay in the area for a few days whilst Delaplane does his best to oblige her.  During her stay, she meets a younger woman, Alice, who is engaged on the same seemingly futile quest - to find her fiancé, who enlisted in the last year of the war, around the same time as Irène's husband.  Delaplane suspects that the husband and the fiancé might be one in the same man, but he keeps this to himself.  The discovery of a wrecked hospital train in a tunnel provides Irène and Alice with hope that soon their search will be over, but by this time Irène realises that she is deceiving herself if she wants to see her husband alive.  It is Delaplane she loves, and to her surprise he feels exactly the same way about her.  Despite his intense feelings for Irène, the commander cannot bring himself to utter the three words that will make her his wife...