Almost a century after its publication – and its first adaptation to the cinema – the famous novel by Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), is back on our screens – big and small, Netflix obliges – in a powerful and horrifying interpretation by German filmmaker Edward Berger. The original story, which offered an authentic immersion in the trenches of the First World War, finds, in the echoes of the guns which rumble today on the European continent, a resonance of undeniable urgency.
1917. For several months now, the Allied and German forces have been waging unsuccessful trench warfare on the Western Front, which stretches from the North Sea to the border between France and Switzerland. Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer, grandiose), a German teenager, lies about his age to enlist with some comrades animated by patriotic and romantic fervor. Within days, the young men are thrown onto the battlefield with mediocre equipment, minimal training and the uniforms of soldiers who have died there.
From then on, everything is just a race for survival. Running forward, eyes filled with dread, not letting your gaze wander towards the detonations, the falling bodies, the friends left behind. Run for some eggs or a chicken, to escape the farmer’s gun. Running towards the possibility of a future, even if it is only a prison populated by ghosts. The men here are just cattle for the ego of the powerful, “a pair of boots with a gun”.
While the senses of the characters are annihilated by the horror, those of the spectator are constantly solicited by the visceral and spectacular experience – because it is indeed a spectacle that it is – proposed by Edward Berger. The wide shots offer breathtaking landscapes, half-tinted skies, graceful and bare trees, immobile and grandiose plains, as if to remind us that something beautiful will resist the stupidity of men.
Then, the camera approaches, revealing the bodies, chilled with cold, wrapped in a shroud of icy gel. She weaves through the trenches, testifies to the promiscuity of the bodies, makes her teeth chatter and cries of distress heard, drags herself through the mud, the blood, the fragments of bone until an intolerable not always easy to justify . Each scene is haunted by this dark and insistent music like a long complaint, these three notes which freeze the blood and sound the death knell of a part of humanity.
The contrast between battlefield action and diplomatic talks is even more stark. From chaos and massacre, we pass to still lifes, to symbolic and grandiloquent chiaroscuro, to the perfectly parallel alignment of two parties in negotiation, separated by a table, a few croissants and sausage.
In line with 1917 (2019) by Sam Mendes, and to better underline the absurdity of war, the filmmaker chooses to dwell only on the present of his characters, on this distress which, in any case, leaves no room for any future. A powerful film, but of incredible violence.