Life & Nothing But [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

There are at least five stories in Life and Nothing But, and most of them could make a movie in themselves. There is the story of Major Delaplane (Philippe Noiret) who in 1920 has the task of trying to identify the 350,000 French soldiers who remain on the missing roles. There is the story of the hypocrisy behind the choosing of an unknown soldier who eventually will be buried with great pomp and honors beneath the Arc de Triomphe. There is the story of Irene de Courtil (Sabine Azema), married to a missing soldier who comes from a rich and privileged family. There is the story of Alice (Pascale Vignal) whose fiancee and lover was last seen in a battle where hundreds of soldiers were wounded or killed. And we have the story of the thousands of wives, parents, brothers and sisters of those 350,000 missing men who, nearly two years after the end of WWI, still have no idea of what happened to their men...are they alive, are they dead, are they horribly wounded, are they forgotten in some hospital or mental ward?

Delaplane is an army officer who is consumed by his job of identifying the missing, of finding corpses and tracing who they were. His superiors think he is reckless and unreliable. The generals, the politicians and the industrialists want nothing more than to let the missing stay missing. That way bad decisions and pointless battles may escape notice, and protected factories can go back to business. Delaplane is even more cynical as he sees the rush to find the remains of an unidentified soldier to be honored in Paris. He has to deal with the aristocratic Madame de Courtil and with the schoolteacher, Alice. He is brusque and cynical, yet he is dedicated to finding and identifying every one of those 350,000 missing men that he possibly can.

One long, outstanding sequence takes place in a huge, unstable railway tunnel. Toward the end of the war a train carrying munitions, gas shells, supplies and a car full of wounded soldiers entered the tunnel. The Germans in retreat had mined the place and it blew. Now, two years later and deep in the tunnel, Delaplane is trying to dig through the rubble, the unexploded gas shells and the torn tracks and find the car of bodies. In the field nearby relatives are waiting. Soldiers are sifting through dirt and rubble to find traces of bodies and belongings. Tables have been set up holding every manner of object which have been recovered so far, some matched with the bodies they were found on. People pass by the tables trying to find something that would tell them the fate of a loved one. They don't expect life; they just want closure.

Tavernier holds these stories together thanks to the power of Philippe Noiret as Major Delaplane, to the power of outrage at what Delaplane is up against, and to a script which manages to combine sardonic humor with a look at what the bureaucracies of war do to the men who fight the wars. This is not a grim movie, but a poignant and sad one. "One patriotic song and off they go to war," says Irene de Courtil to Delaplane. They had been seated at a small restaurant where a black jazz band had been playing. Then a French woman came on stage and sang a song of how we can fight and then be comrades. The young soldiers all stood and joined in the song. So did Delaplane. "It's a club," she says fiercely to Delaplane. "It will be a club for years to come, this club of those who won the war. And the losing side will have its club, too. You know why I think of clubs? Because women aren't admitted! Nothing scares you men more than women, their wombs, their courage, their watching eyes..."

And yet, as a friend and sculptor points out to Delaplane, the remains of the war now mean great business. "It's the Golden Age, my friend," he says. "Nothing like it since the Greeks, since the cathedrals. Even mediocre artists have their hands full. A monument per village. Three hundred sculptors for 35,000 towns. Everybody wants his doughboy, his widow, his pyramid, his marble, bas-reliefs, inscriptions. It's a factory. Better than the Renaissance. It's the resurrection." "Thanks to our dead," says Delaplane.

Eventually the stories come together. The unknown soldier is selected with pomp and cynicism. Says Delaplane, "Officials are reassured by the story of the unknown soldier. They had a million and a half men killed, and now we'll only think about this one." Delaplane discovers the fate and identity of Irene's husband and Alice's lover. There are some twists and turnings. While each major character either chooses or is forced to choose life, the future for Delaplane and Irene is indefinite. On balance, while I liked this movie a lot, there still are probably too many things going on for Tavernier to handle with complete success. Still, it's always a satisfying experience to see Philippe Noiret, with those shrewd eyes and bloodhound eye lids, take on a role of real substance.

The DVD transfer looks very good. There is one significant extra, a fine filmed interview with Tavernier and Noiret talking about the movie and how it was developed. For those interested in Tavernier, you might want to watch one of the blackest of black comedies, Coup de Torchon, also with Noiret. For good jazz and a fine story, 'Round Midnight is worth seeing. And for rip-roaring sword-fights, try D'Artagnan's Daughter.

Bertrand Tavernier's "Life and Nothing But" (1989) is a French movie about the absurdity and suffering of WWI. It depicts the story of Major Dellaplane (Philippe Noiret), an obsessive and deeply committed superior officer, whose task is to try to match up the 350 000 dead soldiers with the missing from families' description. His path will cross that of two very different women; the Parisian aristocrat Irène de Courtil (Sabine Azéma) and Alice (Pascale Vignal), a provincial schoolteacher. Post WWI France is a country in economical and political recession, in need of healing and reconciliation. Dellaplane's mission (to put names on faces) carried with zeal and obession, will soon conflict with the more pragmatic interests of the politicians, the industrialists and oddly enough to that of the army. Tavernier's reputation for political statements and for being l'homme en colère (the angry man) is brilliantly translated in Dellaplane's resilience against oblivion, and the way with which human life has been tragically devalued during the war. Yet, Dellaplane is not the hero of this movie, and his mission - despite his relentless commitment - only makes sense in a collective structure. Life and Nothing But is a teamwork (Jean Cosmos co-signed the screenplay), intended to celebrate life through a thorough denunciation of the hypocrisy and profit-driven mentality of post WWI France. Tavernier's choice of using long-shots (only one close-up of Dellaplane, at the end of the movie) to induce a sense of community, is consistent with Dellaplane's quest for a collective sense of justice and decency. When Dellaplane meets with Irène, his first reaction is irritation, as she does not seem to understand the importance of his task. He told Irène that he will "devote exactly one 350,000th of his stunning incompetence" to help her locate her missing husband. Dellaplane's struggle between his enormous task and his attraction to Irène is well reflected in Tavernier's use of wide-angle lenses that create a sense of spatial relationship, over that of intimacy. Yet, there is a sense of nascent intimacy between Dellaplane and Irène, an overwhelming feeling of love and desire, to which he first did not respond very well, "J'étais en panne de tout", (I ran out of everything) he said to his commanding officer, after his first and only private encounter with Irène. Life and Nothing But won the BAFTA Film Award as well as the Cesar for Best Actor (Philippe Noiret) and best film score (Oswald d'Andrea). Overall, Life and Nothing But is not a grim movie, despite its subject matter. My strongest critic is that I found it rather difficult to relate to the main characters, precisely because Tavernier's emphasis on the community rather than on the individual. On the bright side, I must say that I liked the scenario and the way Tavernier's mind works. As far as I know, he succeeded in capturing the social and cultural landscape of post WWI France. A special mention to the very last part of the movie, when Dellaplane now retired from the army, reads the love letter he sent to Irène in New York. It has the royauté dérisoire (the derisory grandeur) of a true gentleman. This DVD edition is in French, with English subtitles and offers an interview with Bertrand Tavernier and Jean Cosmos, scenes selection, filmographies and finally a stills section. For those who liked Philippe Noiret, this movie is a real treat. To him too, life and nothing but came first.

It is 1920 and the war in France that ended two years previously had claimed 1,500,000 French lives and another 350,000 are missing. Thousands of people are searching the battlefields of northern France desperately trying to discover whether their missing husbands, sons and sweethearts are dead, hoping against hope that they may be alive, perhaps wounded and having no memory of who they are. Major Dellaplane, played by Philippe Noiret, has the unenviable task of trying to identify the thousands of corpses that are being constantly discovered all over France and his latest job is identifying the remains of soldiers who were in a train that was blown up when it ran over a German mine in a tunnel in eastern France.

He meets Irene, played by Sabine Azema, the wife of a soldier who went missing shortly before the end of the war and they are gradually drawn to each other and in an environment of overpowering sadness and loss their love grows as it dawns on them that Irene's husband is indeed dead and they discover that he is linked to somebody else searching for him. Dellaplane is a bitter, angry but totally dedicated man who deeply feels the loss of human lives every day and one way he pays tribute to the fallen is to use all his energy to identify the dead and compile statistics in an almost obsessive way to catalogue the loss in human lives.

Concurrently with Dellaplane's mission another officer is on very different kind of search but he is not looking for a particular soldier but it has to be a soldier without a name - the dead man will become the Unknown Soldier whose remains will be placed under the Arch de Triumphe.

Noiret and Azema are superb in their roles and the director, Bernard Tavenier, has produced an outstanding, deeply moving and memorable film that brilliantly conveys the tragic loss of life in war but in the midst of this bleakness human feeling can still triumph, love can flourish and something good can come out of something so awful.

Sadly, I only have VHS cassette of the film but I would dearly love to obtain a DVD Region 2 copy so if there is anyone out there who has one to spare I am your man.