Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A well intentioned but horribly cliched and inaccurate misfire, 27 Nov 2007
Charles Dickens knew the importance of establishing horror if you want to show moments of peace or redemption that have real impact. After all, he began A Christmas Carol by emphasising Jacob Marley's death because, without that knowledge, `nothing wonderful can come of this tale.' Sadly, Christian Carrion's Joyeux Noel/Merry Christmas seems oblivious to that lesson, and so without anything tangible in the way of the horrors of war or the psychologically draining nature of trench warfare by way of contrast, there's no sense of relief or wonder to the brief respite offered by the spontaneous 1914 Christmas Truce on the Western Front. As a result, the film carries no real weight. What's worse is just how horrifically bland it all is.
At its best it's well-intentioned pap, a woefully inaccurate retelling that gets practically nothing right, historically or artistically. The scant regard it has for history is bad enough when there are so many powerful true incidents from that period to draw on, but the sheer overpowering wrongness of many of the inventions and the complete lack of any emotional involvement with the barely drawn stereotypes is equally deadly. If you're going to invent, at least invent something better! Perhaps it's the preponderance of production companies involved in this Franco-German-Anglo-Romanian co-production (more than a dozen companies and tax shelter funds are credited) that left it so bland and lifeless - certainly there's a feeling that this is not the film anyone wanted to make, merely the one that everybody could more or less agree on
Most of the performances are weak to invisible, with Gary Lewis failing miserably to provide anything but an actor's extreme discomfort in a role that's meant to be the heart, soul and conscience of the film while Benno Furrman substitutes a look of stoic indigestion for characterisation as Diane Kruger's Danish opera singer in the trenches (no, seriously) mimes her way through the classics. Only Daniel Bruhle makes much of an impression out of his underwritten role, although even he is outshone by a blink-and-you-ll-miss-it cameo from Michel Serrault and Suzanne Flon that briefly wakes up the film.
Carrion's previous film, Une Hirondelle a Fait le Printemps/The Girl From Paris, was quite superb, for the most part avoiding cliché or whimsy and creating believably flawed characters, which makes his flat handling here seem all the worse. Easily the most desperately disappointing film of the year. You'd be much better off reading Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton's excellent 'Christmas Truce' instead.
Carrion does admit to the dubious accuracy in the film in the interview that is, along with his audio commentary, the main extra on this DVD (though for some bizarre reason the out-of-copyright WW1 photographs used in the interview are all shown out of focus at the behest of Columbia's over-zealous legal department). However, the deleted scenes and documentary on the Australian 2-disc DVD have not been included.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A Wonderful Look Back, 7 Mar 2009
This film is a moving dramatization of the spontaneous Christmas truce of 1914, during which soldiers on both sides met in no-man's land, sang hymns, played sports, and exchanged gifts. Needless to say, the generals, warm and well-fed in their far-from-the-front chateaux, were not happy about that and did their best to see it didn't repeat the following three Christmases of the war.
The film is well-done and almost even-handed in its presentation of soldiers from France, Germany and Scotland, except that the French soldiers, for some reason, seem less interesting than the Scottish and German. That's odd, since this 2005 film was apparently a French or Belgian production.
The film's other oddity is that the Scottish officer who participates in and is punished for his role the unofficial cease fire is apparently a Catholic priest (note his use of Latin), as it appears were most of his men. The Scots of that day were mostly Scotch Presbyterian, so I can't explain that little anomaly. Maybe the French/Belgian producers didn't know that. The European intelligentsia of today know very little about religion, hence their instinctive pandering to militant Islam. Religion scares them, so a scary religion seems normal.
Sadly, the Great War in which these men fought has become the Forgotten War. That's unfortunately, because all too many of our modern ills are rooted in that long-ago struggle over mere yards of blasted landscape. The years before the Great War represented the high-water mark in European influence on the world. Europe has never fully recovered from its enormous loses.
-Michael W. Perry, Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements That Led to Nazism and World War II
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