Les Honneurs de la guerre (1960)
Directed by Jean Dewever

Film Review

It wasn't until Marcel Ophuls made his earth-shattering documentary Le Chagrin et la pitié (1971) that the French nation began to face up to the grim realities of the Nazi Occupation.  Since the end of the war, the view that prevailed in France was the myth concocted by General de Gaulle, that throughout the duration of the occupation the country had been a nation of heroic resistance fighters valiantly working in unison to thwart the military ambitions of the Third Reich.  In literature, in films, and certainly in the national press, virtually no one appeared willing to contradict this comforting fantasy, and even one of the most highly regarded French films released after the war, René Clément's La Bataille du rail (1946), makes no bones about fostering this delusion.

Ophuls's film dared to challenge the popular de Gaulle myth, with frank oral testimony that unveiled a far less honourable account of France's wartime experiences.  It was a truth that the French nation was not yet ready to digest.  When it first saw the light of day, the film was viciously reviled by the press and quickly banned by the French government.  Yet this was not the first time that a French filmmaker had dared to challenge the orthodox view of the Occupation.  In 1960, a rookie filmmaker, Jean Dewever, made a bold attempt to offer a more honest account of this far from glorious episode in French history, but needless to say, his efforts to expose the truth were doomed to fail.

It's not hard to see why the ironically titled Les Honneurs de la guerre had such a frosty reception.  Not only does it fail in its duty to glorify the French Resistance, it also has the brazen temerity to humanise the enemy, portraying the German military not as demonic instruments of the vilest regime ever to infect the earth, but as weary victims of a needlessly protracted conflict, as eager for an end to hostilities as the people they are supposedly terrorising.  The horrors of war, whilst never far from the events depicted on the screen, are not dwelt on and for the most part all we see are French villagers and German soldiers making the most of the lull in the fighting, both sides eagerly relishing the peace that is just over the horizon.

In a way that soberly evokes the opening to Alain Resnais's L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), the film begins with a slow, long tracking shot through an apparently deserted French town.  The pristine narrow streets are strewn with banners that celebrate France's Liberation by the Allies in the summer of 1944, and yet there is a deathly silence, a chilling absence of life of any kind.  The only hint of the recent atrocities to hit the town are fleeting glimpses of burning buildings and the dangling lower portion of a hanged resistance fighter.  The town appears to be totally deserted, apart from a small contingent of German troops, who appear wholly dispirited by a war that seems to have gone on forever.  Hungry, weary and humiliated, they are the easiest of targets for the French snipers hiding out on the rooftops.  Some of the soldiers are little more than boys.  The most poignant scene depicts a mortally wounded German conscript bemoaning the fact that if he had opted for a military career he would have been an officer and thereby avoided his fate, dying far from home, from a gunshot wound at the age of 23.

The fatalistic mood of the dispirited Germans makes a stark contrast with the party atmosphere that has overtaken a nearby French village, where an exuberant wedding party is in full-swing.  The only thing that connects the two groups of people is a common desire to end the fighting and return to normal life.  Surely it would be the easiest thing in the world for the two sides to come together and agree a truce?  The cruel message of Dewever's film is that a shared desire for peace is not enough to bring about this outcome.  The other thing that is required is mutual trust - and the absence of this is all it takes to transform comedy into the grimmest of tragedies.

Although Dewever spares us the gruesome spectacle of the final battle in which, presumably, the crushed German battalion is brutally wiped out by their more determined French opponents, we gain a visceral sense of what is taking place, just through the sound of the exchange of gunfire that suddenly erupts at the end of the film - a deafening hellish cacophony that seems to last an eternity.  Here the Resistance are portrayed not as brave heroes, defenders of French nationhood, but as merciless butchers revelling in an orgy of death. Little wonder the film was so ill-received by the French censors.

Despite being banned by the government, Les Honneurs de la guerre was enthusiastically received by many distinguished French filmmakers of the time, most notably François Truffaut.  Another admirer of the film was Jean Renoir, and it is not too difficult to see the influence that this legendary cineaste had on Jean Dewever, through the sun-saturated rural exteriors - so instantly evocative of Partie de campagne (1936) - and the daring way in which the German soldiers are portrayed as humanely as the French protagonists (in sympathy with Renoir's La Grande illusion).  The fact that Dewever allowed his German actors to put their dialogue in their own words adds immensely to the humanity and realism of the scenes with the German soldiers.

Even with the praise of such cinematic luminaries as Truffaut and Renoir, the film failed to have much of an impact when it was first seen, and it has languished in obscurity, all but forgotten, ever since.  This early setback cost its director dearly, effectively strangling a promising auteur career at birth.  Dewever continued making films on and off for another twenty years, but he remained a comparative unknown, confined for most of his career to working for French television.

Les Honneurs de la guerre is a modest low budget work that appears breathtakingly understated compared with subsequent depictions of the Second World War in French cinema - from Henri Verneuil's Week-end à Zuydcoote (1964) to Claude Berri's Lucie Aubrac (1997).  And yet it is no less powerful in its antiwar sentiment.  There is probably no other French film that is so eloquent in its condemnation of that most tragic of human failings - our pathological inability to resolve our differences through dialogue rather than armed conflict.

The film's apocalyptic ending is both chilling and sickening - all the more potent as it is left to the spectator to picture the full extent of the bloody carnage to which only our ears have access.  Can we as a species change our ways and avoid the ultimate Armageddon to which we seem to be inexorably heading?  Can we have any hope in the future of humanity whilst we cling to the sick delusion that war is an honourable activity?  These are the questions that Jean Dewever leaves us contemplating as the ominous word 'Fin' flashes into sight and the guns fall silent.

Film Synopsis

One fine sunny morning in August 1944, the inhabitants of a small French town, Nanteuil, are celebrating their liberation from Nazi occupation when a small battalion of German soldiers suddenly shows up.  The armed invaders soon take control of the town, but a few of the townsfolk evade capture and go into hiding, taking pot-shots at the soldiers from a safe vantage point in a church tower.  Realising that they have already lost the war, morale amongst the German troops is at rock bottom.  Tired and leaderless, they agree that the only course open to them is to surrender to the locals.  To that end, they send one of the French hostages to a neighbouring village, Muzière, to negotiate an immediate truce.

It so happens that the inhabitants of this latter village are in the midst of a wedding party, making the most of a glorious day to celebrate the happy union of two locals.  Before the villagers can reach Nanteuil to make arrangements for the peaceful arrest of the German soldiers, a Nazi officer arrives in the town and orders his men to prepare to surrender to the advancing American army.  Unable to enter Nanteuil as agreed, the party of Muzière villagers draw the obvious conclusion that they have been tricked by the German soldiers.  As hostilities resume, the sound of a ferocious battle rages through the streets...