For those in whom the very phrase Merry Christmas induces a leaden wish to retract into their shell, it's evident that the film-makers rubbed a few neurons together to come up with an appropriate English title. Alas, they couldn't: the American version is Happy Christmas, the stigmata of Disneyfication.
In fact, Joyeux Noël is an utterly cross-grained rendition of the spirit of the holiday, being set in December 1914 when, famously, the combatants across the lines laid down their guns, played football, drank a jovial toast and generally fraternised (for which they could have been shot by their own side) before re-entering the death machine. So it raises yet again the question of whether "without an enemy there can be no war" and is a cold, bleak and tense record of a moment out of carnage. It has been much praised - losing out only to Tsotsi as Best Foreign Film at this year's Oscars.
So it doesn't so much need a parents' advisory as an explanation. The three sides that made their separate peace for a few hours were German, French and Scots, and we know the outcome in advance. This does not preclude some soaring moments: the film begins with an aerial sweep over the ravaged landscape before settling into the trenches, and this possibility of uplift endures as an ideal, or hope, though tragedy is precluded by our awareness that we are witnessing an aberration at the beginning of what one writer has termed the 20th century's "War of the World".
Though the visual frame of the film is curiously limited (perhaps a consequence of financial constraints), it exudes a sense of the physically and emotionally frozen. Of its necessarily many characters, two stand out - Diane Kruger and Benno Fürmann as lovers and singers, whose ethereal rendition of (inter alia) "Silent night" appears to silence the guns and draw a sympathetic response from their foes. Lip-synch failures mar this performance, but it is a wedge in the icy conflict.
Daniel Brühl (German), Guillaume Canet (French) and Gary Lewis (Scots) comprise the trio of officers who permit the ceasefire, and Lewis is particularly impressive as a padré whose faith goes astray in the wilderness.
The fatal flaw lies in Carion's script - which is far too wordy, supererogatory in its defining statements of what we have already witnessed. It does not need a priest to spell out the lesson to be learnt from a living man reduced to a block of rigid, ruined ice. Carion does, however, balance such literary errors with a long scene in which various children stand before an unseen audience and call for the annihilation of their enemies "down to the last woman and child" lest it all have to be done again in the future.
That it was just so done is an irony long symptomatic of the cinema of warfare. Further, it's a moral that is inevitably appended to the collective "sacrifice" of World War 1, the bitter self-reproach of Rudyard Kipling's brutal truth: "If any question why we died/Tell them because our fathers lied."
Such a universal desolation has seldom been evoked for World War 2 - where, superficially, good and evil present their arms. There may come a time when the Allied bombing raids on German and Japanese cities - and the Russian reprisals on the Eastern Front - may furnish a more universal definition of suffering. But, given the temper of our time, not yet.
Ranking the Analysts 2009
Flawless
Slightly flawed
Don't see it
Demand your money back
