In the realm of World War I movies, there is an extreme paucity of majors in “comparison” to, say, World War II with all of its so-called “glamor” (what else could hold the same cachet as a revisionist history of how Hitler was taken down à la Inglourious Basterds or Jojo Rabbit?)–which has always outshone the “inferior” cinematic potential of WWI. That is to say, until Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2004 epic romance starring a then fresh off the Amélie gravy train Audrey Tautou, A Very Long Engagement. Recently usurped, as it were, in prestige by Sam Mendes’ surprisingly fast-paced 1917.
As a heavy-hitting contender at this year’s Academy Awards (only to lose out to the history-making Parasite), 1917 was able to achieve what A Very Long Engagement could not by 1) lacking whimsy 2) being in English and 3) capitalizing on more of the camaraderie elements that were part and parcel of any soldier’s time served during the war. Even so, A Very Long Engagement, though not submitted by France for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars (there was a lot of bad blood about all the government’s financial incentives going out the window when the production company, Warner France, was ruled by the courts to be an American company), managed to at least garner nominations in Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography.
As for 1917 and its more “male friendship-centric” plotline, of course, by the end, like any instant classic of a war film, the motivation behind why the protagonist endures through it all is a result of romantic devotion. Just as it was for Manech Langonnet (Gaspard Ulliel), the sought after subject of Mathilde Donnay (Tautou). Condemned to death in the no man’s land between French and German trench lines after he and four other men are accused of treason for trying to injure themselves and get out early, Manech is assumed to be dead by the French government, though Mathilde is convinced otherwise–that their love was far too powerful for him to “allow” himself to die. Based on the 1991 novel Un long dimanche de fiançailles by Sébastien Japrisot, the fictionalized account of a soldier lost among the files of the French government’s corruption and laziness is in keeping with the tale told in 1917, wherein the lives of soldiers about to be eviscerated by Germans and their much more advanced machinery were at the whims of those at the top who would rather see a battle fulfilled than spare lives so very clearly about to be taken for no viable reason.
In many respects, Sam Mendes’ latest directorial effort (and the first script he decided to write himself–though it seems more like his paternal grandfather, Alfred, did the gruntwork) features a similarly devoted protagonist, Lance Corporal William Schofield (George MacKay). Trying to get through the war without any further incident, Schofield is, alas, enlisted to carry out the delivering of an important message with Lance Corporal Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), who relishes an opportunity to cross over the trenches via no man’s land (the same area that plays so heavily into A Very Long Engagement) to get to his own brother’s, Lieutenant Joseph Blake (Richard Madden), battalion. Schofield is picked by the sheer “luck” of being Blake’s friend, and as a result of British aerial reconnaissance informing General Erinmore (Colin Firth) and his fellow higher up ranks that the Germans’ retreat from a portion of the Western Front near Northern France is tactical, and not actually a retreat, as the British arrogantly assume. Yet anyone who knows the Germans and their eerie mania for diabolical planning ought also to know that nothing they do is without an underlying stratagem.
The tenseness of such a weighty responsibility placed solely on two sets of shoulders is met with General Erinmore’s terse platitude, “He who travels alone travels fastest, don’t you think?” Erinmore doesn’t seem aware of just how prophetic this statement will be as the duo makes their way past no man’s land and into an abandoned trench of the Germans, who were clearly living more cushly within their own barracks, meticulously arranged underground and equipped with a trick wire set off by a “playful” rat (rats are, indeed, almost as abundant in a WWI setting as they are in New York, something that comes across in A Very Long Engagement as well) that causes the explosive booby trap to go off, prompting the entire joint to start crumbling, briefly knocking Schofield out and causing Blake to face that panicky moral quandary where one must decide between leaving a friend for dead as a means for his own self-preservation or “doing the right thing” at perhaps the cost of both of their lives.
Like Schofield, Mathilde knows that no matter what, there is only one right course of action for her. She must find out what really happened to Manech, even if it means unveiling an unpleasant truth she has held out hope against for the past three years (A Very Long Engagement, too, commences in 1917). In the present, her inquiries to various officials and infantrymen about what happened after the five soldiers were dropped at Bingo Crépuscule (“Why not yipee doodle doo?” several men quip of the incongruous name) turn up varying accounts, most of which never specifically cite seeing Manech killed by the albatross (a German fighting plane, not the bird–though the bird version does also serve as a symbol to Mathilde) that passed him by as he carved a trio of Ms into trees like a maniac (the abbreviation intended to stand for Manech’s Marrying Mathilde). And as Mathilde unearths more information about each of the soldiers and their fate, she is led to the ever-hot trail of Tina Lombardi (Marion Cotillard, in an often underrated and forgotten role–though she did win a César Award for Best Supporting Actress), herself seeking to know what happened to her Corsican beloved, Ange Bassignano (Dominique Bettenfeld), at the price of many a government official’s blood.
Ange is among the five featured at the beginning who are given a very Jeunet-esque backstory, rife with the specific quirks only this auteur can give with such visual memorability (sorry, Wes Anderson). And, in certain ways, the camera work in the trenches can only be set up the same way Mendes chose to do it–though of course he took it to an nth degree for an added effect of claustrophobia and perpetual paranoia. With the camera in 1917 remaining with the corporal from the first frame until the last, the fraught pacing (particularly thanks to a tunnel vision-y tracking shot that gives us the same sense of the trenches as the soldiers themselves), there is little time to think about love, least of all losing it. Even so, there is an unspoken reason for wanting so desperately to survive on Schofield’s part. Before they head over the trench to enter no man’s land, he semi-jokingly tells Blake, “Age before beauty.” It’s a sardonic English way of saying, “Don’t fucking get killed. If you must, just get maimed or injured, but whatever you do, don’t die.”
This is the mantra that silently hovered above the five men in Jeunet’s Frenchmen’s version of WWI, with Manech being the only one who took it as seriously as Schofield. Much to the eventual delight of Mathilde, whose ceaseless search proves that maybe love was more of a driving force back when it wasn’t so easily attainable, so literally “at one’s fingertips.” That half of the yearning arose from the absence of a significant other feeding the nostalgia that fuels such an insatiable desire to return to one’s lover no matter how much time passes or how much hope seems to be lost. Indeed, this is the WWI-specific message of both 1917 and A Very Long Engagement, yet it is somehow still the latter that gets the point across more effectively. Maybe it is simply because the English are so clinical when it comes to “the business” of love.
