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Ode to Cocteau, return to Hôtel des Invalides. The flighty Princess (Emmanuelle Riva) hosts one final ball before the Great War, then trades plumes and furs for a nurse's habit to join a caravan of ambulances. Getting to the soldiers at the front is trickier than expected, luckily there's Thomas (Fabrice Rouleau), whose last name "is like an open-sesame at the Ministry of War." Burning cities and piles of bodies await them ("gangrene invaded them like ivy on statues," narrates Jean Marais), Rousseau's war horse gallops by with its mane on fire—hardly the adventure the heroine was hoping for. She heads back home, her romanticism shaken, while the young adventurer forges ahead, a moonstruck schoolboy who believes his own masquerades of heroism. The battleground is as unreal as theater, so that "the child and the spectacle become one." Georges Franju gives the flickering fable a mordant reading, dismay and splendor imprinted on every composition. No Man's Land in Belgium is a wintry, extraterrestrial terrain of battered trenches and poisoned clouds, turn on a light in the darkness and get a bullet in the head. (The risky price of illumination also brings a few seconds of Edith Scob's face, an angelic vision.) The priest forces open a frozen corpse's mouth and drops a host into it, the old warmonger leaps onstage and literally wraps himself in the flag, "qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!" Falsification and transformation, the dreamer awakened at last amid barber wire (cf. Fuller's The Baron of Arizona). A hand-drawn star shines as brightly as the real thing in the closing cosmos, a Cocteau image seconded by Franju. With Jean Servais, Sophie Darès, Rosy Varte, and Bernard Lavalette. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |