I would like to come back to In the west, nothing is new of the German Edward Berger, the only real resistant to the wave ofEverything Everywhere All at Once at the Oscar gala last Sunday. This Netflix production, to be seen at home, already devoted to the British BAFTAs, has it not collected at the Dolby Theater, in addition to the statuette for the best international film, laurels for its camera, its music and its decorations? A real feat under the evening tidal wave.
Classic cinema is losing ground, these Oscars are crying it out, but some voices are already predicting its death. Not so fast! He touches differently, drags precious baggage. Let him shine. In the west, nothing is new does not claim to explore the multiverse as Everything Everywhere All at Once – become untouchable by his formal audacity despite his rough sides -, but the winner number 2, however academic, upsets. Impeccably produced, wonderfully set to music, adapted from the semi-autobiographical novel by the German Erich Maria Remarque, the film takes a pacifist look at the 1914-1918 war. From the daily life of the soldiers at the front, we follow the journey at the end of the night. As the war in Ukraine rages, this universe challenges us. The flashback seems to speak of a present-day conflict.
“I am young, I am twenty years old; but I know of life only despair, anguish, death and the chaining of the most superficial and senseless existence to an abyss of suffering, ”wrote the novelist in 1929. On screen, his desperate words come in sound and fury.
However, analogous scenes have been seen many times in the cinema. During the Great War, deep in the trenches, soldiers chattering their teeth in Verdun or elsewhere receive shells on the head, crawl in the mud and call their mothers before passing away. Between Charlot soldier by Chaplin (1918) and 1917 by Sam Mendes (2019), via Paths of Glory by Stanley Kubrick (1957), so many others, their misery has not aged. Each generation knows it intimately thanks to the filmed images.
So why do these haggard hoes under their kepis among derisory dug ramparts give us a different impression than in front of the previous films? Because of the trenches, no doubt. This type of combat was believed to be relegated to a buried military past, like cavalry charges in the field of honour. But that’s good to say… The war in Ukraine presents us with identical muddy ditches on the news where soldiers languish under a rain of bombs. The feeling of going back a century is overwhelming.
In the XXIe century, we imagined modern conflicts, no less sinister in addition, to use computer weapons, by paralyzing the waves at the adversary. But the same shipments of cannon fodder mark out the paths of war. It makes you shudder. Should clashes always cause such bloodbaths? Do leaders learn nothing from previous major conflicts? How to make warmongers relent? All these questions haunt the film and our daily lives.
Let us recall that the Germans had received In the west, nothing is new with a brick and a lantern. His script had focused on certain segments of the brilliant literary work, sacrificing or modifying important parts of the story. It is a perilous undertaking to measure oneself against a canonized novel at home. There, each reader communicates in front of the altar. It drives people wild when a filmmaker dares to tamper with the national treasure. In the west, nothing is new had been brought to the screen in 1930 by the American Lewis Milestone, in an Oscar-winning version prohibited from distribution by the Nazis, but more faithful to the written work. A TV movie had rubbed shoulders with the same novel without too much damage. Edward Berger was the first German to adapt the seminal work. Proximity targets are automatically weakened. No one is said to be a prophet in his own country.
This week, in Berlin as much as in Munich, smiles must freeze at the corner of the lips after these American honors for the shunned film of a compatriot. Unless the Germans snub him even more. Still, filmmakers have the right to offer free adaptations of literary works. It’s happening everywhere. The rest of the planet is not viscerally attached to Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, it is true. A postage that serves us, because Berger’s film resonates better with us. In his classic but striking artistic choices, as through his call for all ceasefires. His pacifist message seems more powerful than yesterday, given the pitiful state of the world, but will he ever be heard? “ Conceived “, sang John Lennon to any wind.