Mathieu Kassovitz – Movie Musings

Old fashioned but energetic and engaging WW2 biopic with a fabulous central performance

Cast: Antonin Baudry

Cast: Simon Abkarian (Charles de Gaulle), Niels Schneider (Philippe Leclerc), Thierry Lhermitte (Henri Giraud), Karim Leklou (Blazej), Simon Russell Beale (Winston Churchill), Campbell Scott (Franklin D Roosevelt), Matthieu Kassovitz (Admiral Darlan), Benoît Magimel (Marie-Pierre Koenig), Félix Kysyl (Jean Moulin), Loïc Corbery (René Pleven), Florian Lesiuer (Fernand), Anamaria Vartolomei (Livia), Pip Torrens (General Montgomery), Daniel Betts (Dwight D Eisenhower), Tom Mison (Anthony Eden), Stephen Campbell Moore (Harold Macmillan), Anthony Calf (Anthony Spears)

In 1940 France was in ruins. Crushed in weeks by the Nazi war machine, occupied and run by a collaborating government, its army defeated, morale crushed and future open to question. Should the ragged remains of its army fight on or not? The overwhelming consensus seemed to be no. Hundreds of commanders, willingly or not, aligned with Marshal Petain’s Vichy government, on paper the only thing with a claim to being the legal government. It was not a view shared by Charles de Gaulle (Simon Abkarian), newly minted as a French General and determined, against all logic, to carry on fighting.

By doing so, he became a national hero. But that was very, very far from being a foregone conclusion. Something that comes out loud and clear in Antonin Baudry’s reassuringly old-fashioned slice of military biography, handsomely filmed on an epic canvas. De Gaulle doesn’t shirk at all in showing how frequently De Gaulle’s building of the Free French and gaining recognition as a legitimate ally was a Don Quixote like quest. De Gaulle is even given a Sancho Pansa: Blazej a Polish plumber recruited as loyal aide (an invented character, designed to subvert a negative French stereotype). It perhaps could only have been achieved by someone as relentlessly focused, committed, uncompromising and shrewdly cunning like Le General. Truly right-man-right-place.

Across its two parts (and over five hours) De Gaulle mixes an atmospheric look at the back-room struggles for power in the Free French – the anti-Petain French forces being rive with conflicting agendas and awash with Johnny-come-latelies and Nazi-sympathisers who smell the way the wind is blowing – with well-shot and edited WW2 battle sequences. The latter have the added advantage of being less well-known (outside France) battles: Bir Hakeim (1942) and Ksar Ghilane (1943). Both showpiece heroic against-all-odds stands by the French against overwhelming German forces. They both also serve as a clear indication of the extreme lengths the Free French had to go to both their worth. Near suicidal acts of courage, with a heavy cost, essential to establish their moral and political force.

De Gaulle himself is absent from the battlefield, but very much engaged in a long-running struggle to build a Free French movement. From arriving in England, he meets obstinacy and defeatism. De Gaulle is very good at showing how this organisation is slowly and painfully built, almost a recruit at a time. The very qualities that will make De Gaulle such a powerful figure later – stubbornness, bluntness and unbending determination – frequently put-off supporters (there is a great expectation-defying scene where De Gaulle gives a hilariously blunt recruitment speech to captured French naval men, who respond by almost to a man refusing). Most of Part 1 covers the incremental steps of turning the Free French from a room of believers, to an actual military force that’s part military movie, part caper (with De Gaulle and co smuggled over African borders). So well does the film stress the difficulty, that each step forward is enormously satisfying.

De Gaulle suggests the main advantage its subject had was Winston Churchill recognising the prickly maverick as a kindred spirit. De Gaulle’s main relationship – awash with arguments as it is – is the love-hate bromance between De Gaulle and the British leader. Francophile Churchill – talking in an easy if stilted French – sees a lot to respect in another leader taking a stand when all seems lost. Excellently played by Simon Russell Beale, Churchill is a mass of realpolitik and teary sentimentality, backing De Gaulle when no-one else will, then frequently demanding he be cut lose in favour of a more pliant leader. But De Gaulle returns time and again to the sentimental affection and respect between the two, for all their vast differences.

You can’t say the same for De Gaulle and Roosevelt. Interestingly, if De Gaulle has a villain its the US President. Sure, the Germans are enemies on the battlefield – and brutal occupiers and torturers in Occupied France – but they are mostly anonymous or glimpsed only through dust-filled binoculars on battlefields. It’s the De Gaulle-loathing Roosevelt, played with self-satisfied superiority by Campbell Scott, who becomes the face of every obstacle in the way of a Free France, depicted as planning to turn the country into a US-occupied colony (a real plan, that never advanced as far as it is shown here).

Roosevelt backs a wave of alternative leaders, from collaborationist Admiral Darlan (Matthieu Kassovitz, suitably arrogant and two-faced) to the deferential General Giraud (Thierry Lhermitte, brilliantly using bluffness to hide how out of his depth he is). He excludes De Gaulle from decisions and refuses to work with him. De Gaulle is keen to show other Americans – noticeably Eisenhower – unhappy with this. But it’s a sign of current Euro-US relations that De Gaulle presents the Americans more as obstacles than crucial allies. (De Gaulle also shows many of the Free French’s most effective soldiers are Africans from their colonies – all of them, to a man, banned from D-Day thanks to American segregationist policies).

De Gaulle runs a parallel storyline of the growth of resistance movements in France. It does this with surprising nimbleness, seeing the development through the eyes of two young idealists: Fernand (Florain Lesier) and the Jewish Livia (Anamaria Vartolomei). At first, both these characters feel like representative figures – it’s one of Part 1’s neatest tricks to reveal Fernand is in fact very much real with a crucial role to play in world events. Livia, very well played by Vartolomei, represents a host of brave women caught up in the tensions and terrors of the resistance. The resistance itself, like the rest of the Free French, is a hard-won battle to form, fought by Félix Kysyl’s Jean Moulin (a very much real hero of the French resistance) – like De Gaulle a stoic but determined man, willing to take risks to save France’s honour. These sequences – from early student protests met with hard-handed Petain responses to the growth of networks and tense rooftop escapes from the Gestapo – have a palpable tension.

But the heart of De Gaulle is the general himself. It’s lucky the film has landed such a perfect actor for the role. Simon Abkarian not only looks a great deal like this ram-rod military man, but also brilliantly mixes De Gaulle’s utter self-belief and domineering refusal to compromise with small moments of doubt. Abkarian’s fantastic performance has just enough humanity to keep us rooting for him. De Gaulle charts the subtle developments of his political skills – from the imperious man of the start of Part 1 who alienates as many as he wins over, to Part 2 balancing his stubbornness with wily politicking and weaponizing of his unassailable reputation.

One of De Gaulle’s key insights is that the battle for France was as much – if not more – about deciding who would represent the country, as much as it was defeating the occupying forces. If France was led by non-entities or those (like Darlan) tarred by working with Germans, its place on the world-stage post-war would have been a very different one. De Gaulle also understands that presenting unjust against-the-odds battles (both military and political) very quickly leads us to admire and root for the heroes struggling to do the right thing.

It may be, in many ways, an old-fashioned film, carefully laying out events and focused on a grand canvas of the war, rather than recent trends for biographies to focus on single, representative events in detail. There are, as a result, scenes where characters essentially tell each other news to keep the plot going. It’s easy to see spiritual similarities with Patton, another epic biopic of a prickly figure with a messianic complex (although De Gaulle is far less ambiguous about its lead). But De Gaulle tells a story that, certainly outside France, is far fresher and less familiar.

And it manages to make the struggle to win France’s freedom and honour constantly on a knife-edge. Either on the battlefield or in the committee room, the odds never favour De Gaulle. Desperate punts are made, some of which fail spectacularly. Humiliations are frequent. But they make the success sweeter. It’s that – and Abkarian’s excellent recreation of the future French icon – that makes De Gaulle such a satisfying watch. I’d be fascinated in seeing a sequel, covering De Gaulle’s post-war French leadership, (De Gaulle pointedly states at one point he has recognised the UK will always favour the US over Europe, a neat wink at his later political positions). But for now, this is an old-fashioned, grand WW2 epic that tells a less familiar story with a great deal of energy.

Eric Bana leads a team of Mossad agents in Spielberg’s uneven terrorism drama Munich

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Eric Bana (Avner Kaufman), Daniel Craig (Steve), Ciarán Hinds (Carl), Mathieu Kassovitz (Robert), Hanns Zischler (Hans), Geoffrey Rush (Ephraim), Ayelet Zurer (Daphna Kaufman), Mathieu Amalric (Louis), Michael Lonsdale (Papa), Marie-Josée Croze (Jeanette), Lynn Cohen (Golda Meir)

At the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics, 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team were murdered by a Palestinian terrorist cell, Black September. The world was shocked and appalled. Israel responded with a hard-line anti-terrorist campaign, that saw Mossad teams traversing the globe, assassinating Palestinian leaders involved with Black September. They learned not only was terrorism a hydra, but that the moral high-ground erodes quickly when the shooting starts. Can terrorism be defeated by violence? Munich argues not: instead suggesting violence is a beast that feeds itself – an argument that, in 2005 in the fourth year of the War on Terror (the film ends with a shot of the World Trade Centre) was increasingly relevant to another country, traumatised by the slaughter of innocents.

Adapted by Tony Kurshner and Eric Roth, it’s based on a book Vengeance by George Jones about the man who claimed to be the leader of the Mossad cell (whether that is true or not is debated). He’s fictionalised here (to side-step that issue) as Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana). His team consists of driver Steve (Daniel Craig), explosives expert Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz), forger Hans (Hanns Zischler) and clean-up man Carl (Ciarán Hinds) with Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush) as their handler. The team hunt down and eliminate their targets – but as the mission goes on they pay a heavy cost, both in their eroding of their own moral certainties and in blood as they become targets for repercussions.

Spielberg’s film is his least flashy, least sentimental and (I suppose) most mature film, a cold-eyed, even-handed look at the Middle East conflict that acknowledges faults and consequences on all sides, draped in the muted colours and bleached out photography of 1970s conspiracy thrillers. It’s also a very long and very self-consciously important film, that makes mis-steps and at times is crudely obvious as well as being more interested in posing questions than presenting any answers. Where it is at its best, is demonstrating how campaigns like this are tasks worth of Sisyphus.

Munich takes a long, hard look at the cost of violence – both on its victims and its perpetrators. Death in this film is slow, painful and frequently disturbing. Shot people stagger and slump in drunken shock, dying slowly. Bomb victims are ripped apart, recognisable limps left hanging from walls and ceilings. Machine gun bursts tear bodies apart. The cost of inflicting this violence leaves increasingly deep psychological violence on the team (we don’t get to see if it does on the Palestinians, a limit to the films even handedness), as it becomes harder and harder to treat those they kill as faceless monsters, rather than men with families of their own.

Spielberg reconstructs the horror of the killings in Munich with a documentary realism, not shying away from the horror. It follows the appalling opening moments of the attack, with the athletes taken hostage and the shocked world media reaction. Spielberg returns later in the film to restage the final murder of the athletes at the Munich airport with sickening detail (perhaps too much – but more of this scene later).

Showing the impact of violence from both sides, Munich strains at always being even-handed (despite this both sides attacked it for bias). It’s an Israeli story so we mostly see the psychological impact of carrying out the violence on the Israeli team, and little of the Palestinian perspective. But the film throws in a chance meeting between Avner and what-could-be his Palestinian equivalent, where Avner is brutally told that, when fighting for their home, the Palestinians will never give up, and consider any price worth paying – attitudes he can’t help but recognise as he fights for his own home. The film has clear sympathy with the sufferings of the Jewish people, and their need for a home of their own – but wonders if this is the right way to defend it. Spielberg is a friend to Israel – but wants to be an honest one.

What starts out as clear and simple (a campaign against terror) becomes morally complex. The team’s first targets are sympathetic, family men. When Avner talks to a later bomb victim, he’s friendly and welcoming. A Palestinian cell they (accidentally or maliciously) end up sharing a safe house with, thanks to their mutual French contacts, are surprisingly relatable. The mission’s accomplishments are unclear – the targets are killed, but all that happens is more people take their place. Worse, those that do are only more infuriated by the campaign of violence.

That’s the question – how do you fight terrorism? It breeds on a belief of injustice and persecution – and Spielberg’s film suggests, all the campaign does is pour petrol on that fire. Avner becomes a paranoid psychological wreck by the end of the film, plagued with a loss of moral certainty. The film argues that the only result of all this has been the price he and other have made – an end to the violence is further away than it was at the operation’s beginning.

Spielberg’s film is strong on showing the pointlessness of this campaign. What it’s less strong on is answers. In many ways, the film boils down to a simple “deep down we are all the same, why don’t we just get along” message. While handsomely filmed and daring in its questioning about the futility of anti-terrorist (and indeed terrorist) action, it’s a simplistic film, largely lacking nuance. The characters are ciphers – Bana, for all his skill, plays a shell of a character, designed to make statements, who is alternately ruthless or questioning as the plot demands. Because the film strives so hard to remain even-handed, it brings little to the table itself in terms of proposed solutions, merely focusing on telling us what we know: an eye for an eye eventually makes his all blind.

It’s also a film that has more than its fair share of clumsy mis-steps. It’s view of the world is picture post-card in is simplicity. First thing we see in Paris, is a shot of the Eiffel Tower. Go to London and it rains. First shot in Holland is our characters on bikes. Its characters are largely plot devices, well played but rarely fleshed out in people who feel like human beings, more like mouthpieces to express viewpoints.

Most atrocious of all, the film concludes with a penultimate sequence staggering in its misjudgement. Retired and living in America, Avner makes focused, vigorous love to his wife intercut with the showing of the final deaths of the athletes in brutal detail. It’s tasteless, ill-judged and horrendously unclear. I suppose we are meant to think Avner is purging himself of his burden of guilt – but the scene is so appallingly done, so grossly detailed it comes across as both offensive and insultingly twee in using the deaths of real people (staged in detail) to help our lead character feel better about himself. When Spielberg does sex, he invariably gets it wrong – and does again here.

Munich is a very worthy film, but it’s too-long, dramatically simple, for all its daring commentary on the war on terror. It’s well-acted – Michael Lonsdale and Matthieu Almaric are very good as Avner’s French contacts, while Hinds is a stand-out among the team – but the characters are ill-formed and the entire film takes a very long time to make a very simple point. Well-made but a film trying a little too hard to always be profound.