Patrouille de choc (1957)
Directed by Claude Bernard-Aubert

Film Review

Having served a long stint as a reporter in Indochina during the war, Claude Ogrel was better placed than almost anyone to make a film about the conflict which ended in humiliating defeat for France in 1954 and provided the overture for America's equally misguided Vietnam War.  It was a war that was practically a taboo subject in France at the time and when he completed Patrouille de choc, under the name Claude Bernard-Aubert, Ogrel had a rough time with the government censor.  Unimpressed with film's pessimistic tone, the censor insisted not only on a change of title (it was originally called Patrouille sans espoir) but also the removal of its grim ending showing the complete annihilation of a French garrison.  Since, the film has been restored to its original form and is consequently one of the grimmest war films ever made in France.

Whilst it may lack the coherence and dramatic impact of Pierre Schoendoerffer's more polished La 317e section (1965), which offers a similarly realist stance of the Indochina War, Patrouille de choc is an involving, eye-opening film that succeeds in evoking the true horror of war.  More importantly, it provides a valuable first-hand account of the experience of soldiers serving in the Indochina War, most of whom were barely out of their teens, with many destined to be killed or mutilated in combat with the doggedly persistent Vietminh.

For the most part, the film resembles a documentary that focuses on the peaceful co-existence between the soldiers and the local villagers under their care, and this is what makes the events depicted right at the end of the film all the more horrific.  It is hard to think of another film that has so brutally nihilistic an ending as this one.  It is like a scene from the Apocalypse, in which every character we have met in the course of the film is savagely slain, snuffed out in a frenzied orgy of destruction.  With France embroiled in another disastrous military escapade in Algeria, Patrouille de choc was just too inflammatory for the French cinema-going public and so the tragic ending was curtailed by the censorship office to leave the spectator with a vestige of hope, even though there was patently none to be had.

Film Synopsis

During the Indochina War in the late 1940s, Lieutenant Perrin is in charge of a small battalion of French troops at a remote outpost in Vietnam.  The soldiers are on the best of terms with the locals and provide them with both education and essential medical supplies.  In return, the grateful villagers keep an eye out for any sign of a possible attack by the Viet Minh.  For a while, the region enjoys an almost unreal tranquillity.  The soldiers are glad of the peace but boredom soon sets in amid expectations of an impending assault.  When the peace ends, it ends with a brutal suddenness.  One night, the Vietnamese insurrectionists converge on the garrison and launch a fierce, all-out attack.  Such are the scale and ferocity of the onslaught that Perrin and his men are caught completely off-guard and can only put up a token resistance.  The French soldiers are vastly out-numbered by their Viet Minh attackers, and the grim outcome is all too certain...