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L'eclettico Bertrand Tavernier (France, 1941) si dedico` inizialmente
alle rappresentazioni (stilisticamente ineccepibili) della
rivoluzione attraverso i secoli in forma romantica e con l'accento sulla presa di coscienza degli umiliati.
L'Horlogér de St Paul/ The Clockmaker (1974), tratto dal romanzo "L'Horloger d'Everton/ The Watchmaker of Everton" (1954), di Simenon, e` il ritratto intimista di un artigiano che durante le lotte politiche si trova alla mercè di coloro che vogliono sfruttare il fatto che suo figlio abbia assassinato un capo fabbrica.
Il capriccio storico
Que la Fete Commence/ Let Joy Reign Supreme (1975) fu una parentesi:
un nobile decaduto del Seicento solleva una rivolta popolare che viene sfruttata da un astuto abate amico
fidato del re e in odore di eccessi. Lo sfacelo della corte e della nobiltà, la liturgia del potere, il
donchisciottismo degli esclusi in una perfetta rievocazione dell'epoca libertina.
Le Juge et l'Assassin/ The Judge and the Assassin (1976) rievoca il massacro di pastorelle
compiuto da uno psicopatico alla fine del secolo scorso e il processo per mandarlo alla ghigliottina da un
giudice non molto più sano; ansia tragica.
Des Enfants Gates/ Spoiled Children (1977)
La Mort en Direct/ Death Watch (1980)
e` una tragedia classica ambientata in un futuro presente, e si dipana attraverso segni edipici (l'autopunizione attraverso l'accecamento), la peregrinazione, cannibalismi (il pubblico che segue l'agonia in diretta, che "consuma" perfino un'agonia), denunce sociali (lo sfruttamento, il cinismo del Quinto Potere, degli uomini d'affari), lirismo figurativo, ansia e mito della morte e dignità umana (il suicidio come arma estrema di difesa del privato); un atto d'accusa contro tutti, esclusa lei, l'unico essere umano rimasto in questo futuribile 1984.
Un reporter che ha una
camera nel cervello viene incaricato di tenere compagnia a una donna (Schneider) condannata da un
male fatale in modo che la stazione televisiva il tutto sugli schermi della nazione; lo straziante spettacolo
ha un grande successo, ma al reporter rimorde la coscienza, fino al punto che si acceca per mettere fuori
uso la camera; e da quel momento la donna diventa la sua guida, finchè la troupe televisiva li
trova; la donna scompare, e si scopre che non è mai stata malata: tutto era stato organizzato dal
manager della televisione che aveva corrotto il dottore perchè la avvelenasse poco per volta.
A Week's Vacation (1980)
Coup de Torchon/ Clean Slate (1981) is an adaptation of
Jim Thompson's novel "Pop. 1280" (1964) except that Tavernier transposes the story from the US province to Senegal when it was still a French colony.
It becomes a film noir (sex, racism, humiliation, revenge, madness) with a cast of colonial misfits, almost the antithesis of the nouvelle vague.
The reconstruction of colonial Africa is impeccable.
The story is rendered as a sort of Moliere tragicomedy but it follows faithfully
Thompson's novel: if you know the novel, you already know everything that is going to happen (minus some of the protagonist's stream of consciousness).
It is mostly valuable as a visual feast.
The film is set in French Africa during the colonial era on the even of the world war.
An old man watches from a distance as a group of African children eat with their hands.
Just then the Sun disappears in an eclipse. The man lights a fire so that the children can warm up.
Maybe it's just a dream because the man is wakon up by his
unhappy wife
Huguette
who criticizes him for being a coward and not daring to tell
the rich Vanderbruck to move his stinking latrines:
Lucien is the town's cop.
His wife's spoiled "brother" Nono lives with them:
she treats him like a little child and he calls her "mom", but they are clearly lovers, living in the same house with the cuckold.
Nobody respects Lucien in the town of Bourkassa.
In particular, LePeron and his brother, two pimps always elegantly dressed,
treat Lucien like a clown.
His only friend is the black "prisoner" who helps him at the police station,
Fete-Nat.
A man beats him his wife in the street while Lucien is at the barber and Lucien could care less. When the fight is over, Lucien runs outside pretending to help
the woman. Instead he puts his hand one her legs, and she,
Rosette, hints that she wouldn't mind having him as a lover.
LePeron and his brother almost kill him when they are illegally shooting
at cadavers left to drift down the river. Lucien tells them that they are breaking the law but he will not fine them in exchange for a small bribe.
They throw him in the river and then pay him the bribe.
Lucien goes to complain with the
French commandant, Marcel, and meets his new friend Paulo.
The commandant and Paulo scorn Lucien and try to teach him to stand up for himself by kicking him in the ass in front of a black crowd.
On a train ride he meets the young pretty teacher Anne who just arrived in town.
In the evening he confronts the pimps with a gun, determined to take his revenge.
He forces them to sing a song and then shoots them in cold blood.
He kicks the corpses into the river.
His wife wakes him up in the middle of the night:
Marcel is banging on the door. The pimps have disappeared and Marcel suspects that Lucien killed the pimps,
but Lucien denies it and pretends to be the usual coward.
Lucien suggests that Marcel spends the night at the brothel.
In the morning a drunk Marcel is dragged out of the brothel on a wheelbarrow.
Marcel boasts in front of several people that he will teach the pimps a lesson
if they ever resurface. When Marcel is ready to return home, Lucien points out
that, should the pimps be found dead, Marcel would be the prime suspect, having boasted that he wanted to teach them a lesson. Lucien implies that, should the bodies ever show up, it would be better for Marcel to ignore it.
Lucien has outsmarted his superior Marcel.
Lucien is surrounded by racists: the only exception is the teacher, Anne.
The teacher, however, witnesses his cowardice when Lucien refuses to stop or
arrest Rosette's vicious husband,
Marcaillou,
a white man, who beats Friday, a black man, unconscious. Lucien warns him about
a minor offense and walks away. She is shocked.
But later, when nobody is around, Lucien shoots Rosette's husband and then
visits Rosette to tell her that Marcaillou is dead.
They have sex and then Lucien takes Rosette to see (and insult) her husband's corpse.
Later the whole town watches a film projected in the main square.
Lucien pays the ticket for the teacher Anne and her pupils and sits next to her,
while his wife, Nono and Rosette watch for free from the balcony of his house.
The show is disrupted by a violent tornado.
Lucien protects the teacher from the dust and then walks her home.
Rosette and Lucien's wife Huguette are good friends, so Rosette can sleep over.
In the middle of the night she hears Lucien work outside at
Vanderbruck's latrines: he is preparing a trap.
In the morning Vanderbruck falls into the shit and he finally decides to
demolish the latrines that greatly annoyed Lucien and his wife.
Nobody accuses Lucien of anything because everybody considers him a sissy.
Lucien suggests that Rosette gets a gun to defend herself from her violent husband and Huguette in person approves and helps her shop for one.
Then Lucien trains her to shoot.
One day Lucien catches Nono climbing a ladder to peep at Anne while she is taking a shower. She beats Nono on the head and Lucien
beats him unconscious when he gets down from the ladder.
Lucien sleeps at Rosette's place. In the morning a black man, Friday,
the one who was beaten by
Marcaillou,
brings back the corpse of Marcaillou and hears a scared Rosette mention that
Lucien is the one who killed him. Friday swears not to tell anyone.
Lucien asks him to help bury the corpse.
Lucien tells Rosette that he's going to kill Friday to make her an accomplice
and then kills him, shooting him in cold blood despite Friday begging that he
never hurt him.
Now he has killed an innocent.
When the two corpses are discovered,
Rosette convinces the colonel investigating the double murder
that Friday and Marcaillou killed each other.
Nono still lives with Lucien and Huguette, and, just before
Marcaillou's funeral, he sees Lucien and Rosette kissing.
He tells Huguette but she, being a good friend of Rosette, doesn't believe him.
At the funeral Rosette tells the priest that she doesn't forgive Marcaillou.
Le Peron's twin brother George shows up looking for the killer of his brother.
Lucien confuses him with lies and philosophical thoughts, even telling him that he (Lucien) is Jesus.
Anne cooks for Lucien and asks him about Huguette and Rosette, but Lucien doesn't want her to come close to him.
Later he writes on the blackboard of her school that he killed the men and signs himself Jesus Christ.
People keep talking that the war may start any time soon.
While his wife is away, but under Nono's nose, Lucien takes all his wife's money and hides outside Rosette's place.
Lucien can hear everything that happens later:
Huguette and Nono come to Rosette's place looking for him;
Huguette explains that she has been saving the money to leave Africa;
Huguette tells Nono to beat up Rosette until she reveals where the money is;
Rosette grabs her gun and kills them both.
Just then the news spreads that France has declared war on Germany.
Rosette asks Lucien for help but realizes that he's going crazy.
Lucien, however, offers Rosette the money he stole from Huguette and suggests
that he leaves town as soon as possible.
Rosette tells Lucien that she hates him: she realizes that he used her to get rid of his wife and her lover.
While Rosette is boarding a ship, the news spreads that war has been avoided in Munich.
At a dance Lucien tells Anne that he cannot love her, that
he has been dead for a long time.
The film ends with the same scene of the beginning in which he is staring at black children but this time he has a gun in his hand and aims at them.
Then he puts it down shaking his head.
The period piece
Une Dimanche a` la Campagne/A Sunday in the Country (1984), adapted from
Pierre Bost's novel, is a meditation on aging,
a visually stunning intimate portrait,
an impressionist watercolor,
and also an existential and moral drama.
In 1912 on a sunny sunday in the countryside an old man wakes up singing.
He lives with a housekeeper Mercedes since his wife died.
The narrating voice informs him that he depends on her.
He is expecting the visit of his son
Gonzague (renamed Edouard by his wife) and
and his wife Marie-Therese and their three children Emile, Lucien and Mireille.
The camera gives us a panoramic of the house and we see a painting in the middle of the living room.
Ladmiral dresses up and walks to the train station, noticing two girls who play outside his gate.
He meets the family that just arrived and, as they walk home, he laments that
he is over 70.
Upon hearing singing in the church, the pious Marie-Therese walks in to catch the last part of the mass.
Ladmiral laments that he hasn't seen his daughter Irene since winter.
Alone at home, Ladmiral stares at a painting in which a woman is flipping through some paintings and we see a brief flashback of him and his dead wife in front of the fireplace.
Ladmiral talks to his son about his paintings.
Marie-Therese, back from church, admires them.
The boys who are playing outside throw a stone and break a window of the house.
Marie-Therese justifies them because they, city boys, are not used to play outdoors.
He tells Marie-Therese that he has painted the garden many times.
Father and son seem to have an idyllic relationship
While they walk in the vast garden,
the son has a vision of his Ladmiral father lying dead in bed.
Ladmiral clearly enjoys the visits of his son and family.
After lunch they all take a nap.
Meanwhile we see a woman driving a car on the dirt road that leads to the village, a rarity in that part of the world in 1912.
Gonzague's sister Irene arrives, escorted by a little dog. She's hyperkinetic
and loud, and doesn't hesitate to wake up her father, who is nonetheless
happy for the surprise visit.
She loses her excitement after making a phone call and sits alone, pensive, in a room.
The narrating voice informs us that Irene thinks that his favorite niece Mireille, who is always sick, will die young.
Irene has a vision of her mother sitting in the living room and adminishing her.
Irene smokes and drinks, and laughs when Mercedes asks her when she's getting married: clearly she's a non-conformistic independent woman.
Irene takes father, brother and Marie-Therese for a ride on her car.
Their adventure is interrupted immediately because
Mireille is stuck on a tree and Gonzague has to climb the tree to rescue her.
She makes a phone call again and again she is depressed after hanging up.
She rushes out and seems ready to drive away when her father announces that
tea is served in the veranda.
The narrating voice informs us that Gonzague visited regularly his father whereas Irene's visit were rare, and that Gonzague was jealous that her visits were more special than his.
Irene doesn't seem to think much of her father's paintings.
The narrating voice informs us that Ladmiral wonders whether Irene is still a virgin or she has a lover.
Irene finds a treasure of clothes in the attic and brings them in the living room, causing a commotion and upsetting her brother.
She insists on paying for the ones she takes for herself.
Then she'd like to leave and give a ride to Gonzague's family but her father
protests that they would leave him alone, and so she accepts to stay till
dinner time.
Irene takes her father for a ride in her car to a cafe by the lake.
Ladmiral tells him that he regrets not having adopted the new styles of painting (Van Gogh, Monet, Cezanne).
We realize that he failed as a painter.
Finally, Irene receives a phone call from a man and gets very upset.
They hear her crying and having a love argument.
She drives away, no longer the strong liberated woman but a weak woman in love.
Her brother, a good responsible family man, stares speechless and remembers
a scene from when they were children.
After dinner Ladmiral walks them to the station where they board the train to Paris.
Ladmiral walks back home alone.
At the gate he sees again the two girls playing, and now we realize that maybe they are just a fiction of his imagination, or a distant memory.
He stares at the painting that he was working on: Irene disrupted the corner of the house that he was painting. He removes the unfinished painting and pulls out a new blank canvas, ready to paint another corner.
The camera moves outside and shows us the garden.
Autour de Minuit/ Round Midnight (1986)
is an affectionate portrait of an artist and a nostalgic tribute to Paris of the 1950s.
It's a film of dark rooms, dark clubs, dark streets.
The protagonists are a failed musician and a failed graphic designer, both of which live of dreams.
The film is set in 1959.
Initially, the narrating voice is Dale, an aging black jazz musician,
who remembers the last time he saw his friend and fellow musician Hershell,
back home in the USA. Dale is talking to a man called Francis and they think they are in
the very room where Dale last saw Hershell.
That time Dale told Hershell that he was moving to Paris.
Hershell scolded him for the innovative way Dale was playing, a style that
was alienating him from his friends.
The narrating voice changes to the younger man, Francis, who informs us that
Hershell and Dale were magic players together.
Dale starts playing saxophone in Paris at a nightclub but at the same time
he's getting drugs from neighbor Ace, in vain scolded
by his female friend Buttercup, who also works like a sort of business manager.
A young white man is sitting outside in the rain with no money to buy a ticket.
The young man, clearly a jazz fan, returns home and tells his little daughter that Dale played
like a god (but he heard him while sitting outside in the rain).
This is the narrator Francis.
The following night Francis is again sitting outside the nightclub listening
to Dale's saxophone.
Dale gets drunk every night after the show. The bartender Ben doesn't want to
serve him any more alcohol. Dale walks out and notices Francis, and asks him
to buy him a drink.
Francis confesses that he's a fan. In return for the drink, Dale smuggles him
into the nightclub for free to listen to his next performance.
Francis then walks Dale home, so now he knows where he lives.
Dale remembers when he was in the army, an all-black unit, and hit his
white superior when he insulted his wife, and was rescued from prison by
a Jewish doctor, and remarks that bebop was invented by the blacks who
got out of the war.
Friends of Dale include Eddie the pianist, who married a white French woman who is an
excellent cook.
Meanwhile, Francis is struggling to pay his bills. He is a graphic designer
whose business is not good and he also has to take care of his daughter Beranger because
her mother ignores her.
One day Francis walks into Dale's building and tells the crowd assembled there
to eat food cooked by Eddie's wife that Hershell died. Dale initially doesn't
want to believe it.
Francis makes videos of Dale's performances and watches them at home with his daughter Beranger.
One night Dale disappears and gets drunk after another fan gives him money.
A woman finds him in an alley and calls the police.
Luckily, Francis arrives just in time to save him from arrest.
Francis puts him in a taxi and delivers him to Buttercup, who puts an unconscious Dale to bed like he's a child.
Buttercup then locks Dale's door, as if to make sure he doesn't leave again,
but Francis, unhappy to see his role model treated like a child, breaks in and tells her that he invites Dale to dinner the following day and leaves address and phone number.
Dale comes to dinner and Francis serves him watered down wine.
However, after another show, Dale finds a way to steal money from a table and get drunk again in a bar. Francis finds him at the hospital and takes him to his own home.
Francis gets rid of all alcohol and asks his daughter to skip school in order
to watch over Dale.
Francis decides that Dale has to move in with them, so he can control his alcohol addiction, and needs a larger apartment but doesn't have any money, so he asks his ex-wife
Sylvie
for a loan. He tells her the truth: that he's doing it for the musician, for a stranger. He says that he wouldn't be what he is now if not for men like Dale (but he's actually a failure).
She rationally says "no" but then sends him a cheque.
Despite Francis' "cure", one night Dale disappears again to get drunk.
Francis looks for him in every hospital.
Francis finds Dale in a hospital where Dale is being examined by a psychiatrist.
Francis overhears Dale telling the psychiatrist that his life is music.
Francis takes him home again but, sure enough, Dale gets drunk again.
Dale is upset to see Francis cry for him and Francis begins to clean up.
He make changes to his music, adding a trumpet player.
Francis takes daughter to listen to Dale at the nightclub.
Francis also manages to sell his design for a poster for an anti-Japanese war film.
Francis also makes a record out of his recordings of Dale.
One day Dale borrows money from Francis and goes out for a walk.
Francis follows him discreetly and is happy to see Dale order an orange juice.
Francis also helps Dale get rid of Buttercup's financial supervision and the
nightclub starts paying Francis directly.
His old friend Darcey Leigh, a jazz singer, shows up and performs with him.
Dale is proud to invite her to a fancy restaurant and pay her with his own money.
After a party at the house that is attended by all of Dale's friends,
Dale becomes nostalgic.
Francis' ex-wife Sylvie shows up while Francis is supervising a studio recording of a quintet led by Dale.
Francis is proud to return some of the money she lent him.
She tells him that, for the first time, she would like to have Berangere for a while.
He understands that something has changed in her life and asks her to come back to him.
For Berangere's birthday, Francis and Dale visit Francis' parents.
Seeing a nice family together makes Dale feel nostalgic about his own.
Dale decides to fly back to New York. Francis follows him.
Now Francis is the tourist.
They are welcome at the airport by Dale's while agent, Goodley, who has already prepared a band and a gig for him.
During Dale's first performance, Francis meets
Dale's teenage daughter Chan.
At a restaurant where Dale is treating his daughter Chan, Francis sees a
drug dealer greet Dale and senses trouble.
Francis is basically there to protect Dale from his old addictions.
They stay in the hotel popular with musicians where Hershell died, and
we realize that we are back to the first scene of the film.
Francis has to return to Paris and take care of his own daughter.
Francis makes two reservations for the flight to Paris but Dale doesn't show up.
Francis returns back home to his life of graphic designer and single father,
but he lives with anxiety.
One day he receives a telegram that Dale has died in a hospital.
A few years later Eddie is leading a large band and playing an outdoors concert in front of a large crowd, and he plays Dale's last song, composed for Chan.
Francis still has the good memories of Dale that he videorecorded.
La Passiòn Bèa trice/ Beatrice (1987), ballata medievale attenta alla vita reale del popolo:
Beatrice è una castellana medioevale, che ha
lottato giorno e notte per salvare il castello dagli approfittatori, oppressa da un padre crudele, che da
piccolo pugnalò l'amante della madre ed ora sfoga i traumi dell'infanzia e la delusione per la
sconfitta, terrorizza i dintorni e violenta perfino la figlia, che alla fine lo pugnala, ed è quasi un suicidio.
La Vie et Rien d'Autre/ Life and Nothing But (1989), more or less based
on Ismail Kadare's "The General of the Dead Army", is a visually striking and farcical anti-war film which is also a romantic melodrama a` la Douglas Sirk.
The occasion for the story is ridiculous, but the man in charge turns it into
a serious life-defining enterprise, and the people involved are real people with
real emotions.
There is clownish idiocy in the bureaucracy, in the business and in the politics
that surround the story, but also in the misadventures of two naive women,
who come from opposite sides of society (an aristocrat and a country girl),
both victims of one of the supposed heroes of the war.
If even the honor and patriotism of the fighters can't be salvaged, was has been
truly for nothing. However, love blossoms in the (physical and metaphorical) ruins of war.
In 1920, two years after the end of World War I,
a nun and a soldier are riding horses on the beach.
A chaffeur stops his car to ask the nun for directions to a military hospital.
At the hospital a commander is photographing the patients who suffer from amnesia: his job is to discover their identities.
An aristocratic woman, Irene de Ourtil, knocks at the door but he rudely sends her away.
She is lost in the vast building until a nurse rescues her. Irene mentions that
she has been looking in many other hospitals. The nurse escorts her to see
an amnesiac who resembles the one she's looking for: her husband.
She is not sure but eventually decides he's the wrong man and leaves.
Meanwhile, a general arrives demanding that the commander begins searching for
eight
unknown dead French soldiers, from which one will be chosen to represent all
of the dead: it has to be nameless, French and dead.
And it's a top-secret mission: the "unknown dead soldier" will be buried under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris during the victory celebrations.
The commander refuses (his mission is to identify everybody) and threatens to tell the newspapers about this top-secret
mission, so the general assigns the job to captain Perrin.
The general emphasizes that the "unknown soldier" must be a French soldiers, not
a German or Brit.
The chaffeur, Andre', is driving the veiled Irene to a new destination, a castle, and stops to
ask for directions at a school just when a government inspector informs the
schoolteacher, Alice, a young woman, that the previous teacher, a young man,
has come back from the front for his job and therefore she is fired.
Alice finds a new job in the bombed-out village working for Valentin's restaurant.
Meanwhile, the car drives through the countryside and we see
a peasant, Abel, plowing a field. He first runs into a helmet and curses because this
happens all the time. But then he runs into an unexploded bomb and tells his
boy to call the mine squad. The boy runs into Alice who bikes to town and
frantically asks for help. But it's all in vain: they hear the blast that the bomb blew up, presumably killing the boy's father.
During lunch hour, Alice is serving the commander at the restaurant and
asks him if he has a job for her. The commander knows her case: she refuses
to go home because she's still hoping to find her fiance, one of the many
missing soldiers. The commander cynically tells her that she's a fool, that
he's either dead or a cripple.
On the way out the commander meets Julien, a newly arrived painter, also
looking for a job, and offers to introduce him to a sculptor.
Irene's car stops outside and Irene orders a tea. Alice brings it outside to
her car.
Andre' the chaffeur eats inside with Valentin the restaurant owner.
Andre' has noticed people working in the field and
Valentin informs him that they are digging a tunnel that was blown out
during the war, buring a Red Cross train.
The commander meets the sculptor in the field where the workers are digging
and we learn that the sculptor is in
charge of building a monuments to the dead.
Andre' and Irene finally arrive at the castle, but the gardener informs them
that the castle is no longer a hospital.
Irene is furious that she's not finding any clue about her husband and complains
with the commander, whose name is Delaplane, about the incompetence of his
office. She says that her husband was shot by friendly fire and believed dead.
She mourned but then a corporal showed up to tell her that her husband was
hospitalized in Germany. The commander lets her vent her anger at him but then
shows her that he has a file about her husband. And now the commander vents his
own anger because her father-in-law, an influential senator and industrialist, keeps demanding
to know what happened to his son, while he, the commander, has to deal with
350,000 cases, not just one. Delaplane fiery tells Irene that he is only
willing to devote one 350,000th of his time to the case of her husband.
Irene is a determined woman: upon hearing of the train buried under the collapsed tunnel, she decides to remain in town, even though the chaffeur has to return the car to the senator.
Irene has to take an ordinary train and then a crowded truck to reach the tunnel.
Meanwhile, Valentin's wife too advises Alice to forget her fiance, and Delaplane offer Alice a job: writing letters for him.
Alice joins the crowd at the tunnel and meets Irene.
The belongings found in the train are laid on a table and families (mostly women) are allowed to search for anything that could belong to their missing husbands and sons.
The painter is befriending Alice.
We follow one family taken into the ruined tunnel to identify a soldier whose
face has been mummified to preserve it until identification.
They do ok but the little soldier who escorts them faints when he sees the dead soldier.
Irene is mesmerized by the ordinary people that she rarely meets in her life.
Delaplane is impressed by her determination and her composure.
Delaplane inspects the tunnel and survives an explosion.
Irene, witnessing the accident, realizes how difficult the commander's job is.
The tunnel has to be closed for the day.
The commander personally escorts Irene to a hotel that has been improvised
inside a steel factory that, ironically, used to belong to her father-in-law.
The painter tries to kiss Alice but she runs away.
The sculptor has noticed that Delaplane is falling in love with Irene.
The following morning Delaplane
confesses to Irene that he is jealous of her husband.
But suddenly Delaplane realizes something odd: the descriptions of Alice's
fiance Charles and Irene's husband Francois are identical.
Delaplane then shows the picture of Irene's husband to Alice and she recognizes him as her Charles. Delaplane coldly tells her that he had a
ring on his finger: he was married. Then he dismisses the devastated girl, who has spent all this time searching for her fiance only to find out that he was an impostor.
Then Delaplane reveals to Irene that her husband not only cheated on her but was
also
a traitor who collaborated with the Germans to save his father's factory,
which in fact was never bombed, and that
the factory can be reopened as soon as Irene's husband is declared dead,
which is the real reason why the Irene's father-in-law, the senator, wants
Delaplane to prove that Irene's husband is dead.
Now it's Irene who throws herself to him. She
reveals to be a woman of passion,
willing to give up everything for a man who is
15 years older than her. And now he is the one who hesitates.
She only asks him to say three words ("I love you") but he can't utter them.
Irene and Alice part as friends.
Alice finally returns home to her parents.
Meanwhile, Perrin has comically been searching for dead unknown French soldiers, escorted by Chinese soldiers who refuse to touch dead people or the coffins
containing dead people. Finally, he accomplishes his mission.
Delaplane has to attend the ceremony in which the eight coffins are presented
to the minister of war and a lottery is held to pick which of the eight will
be the official "unknown dead soldier" of France.
Delaplane tells the general his superior that he has identified 51,000 dead soldiers in a short time. It is a remarkable achievement, but clearly his zealous
risked disrupting the search for the "unknown" ones, and so the general is only
annoyed by Delaplane's statistics.
Months later, Delaplane has retired from the army to his childhood farm and
writes a love letter to Irene, who has emigrated to the USA.
He writes that he is shouting the three words "I love you" every single day
and invites her to join him in his farm.
However, he can't resist and he ends the letter with yet another
calculation related to the victims of the war.
Daddy Nostalgie/ These Foolish Things (1990)
L.627 (1992)
D'Artagnan's Daughter (1994)
L'Appat/ The Bait (1994)
Captain Conan (1996)
Ca Commence Aujourd'hui/ It All Starts Today (1999)
Safe Conduct (2002)
Holy Lola (2004)
In the Electric Mist (2009), his American debut, is an adaptation of
James Lee Burke's crime novel.
The Princess of Montpensier (2010)
Quai d'Orsay/ The French Minister (2013)
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