Joyeux Noël

The Christmas Truce was a series of unofficial ceasefires that took place along the Western front during World War I around Christmas of 1914. Being a war that with the passage of time, has been viewed as a horribly pointless endeavor that destroyed lives on both fronts for a conflict that arose due to those in power, these truces were an indicator of how soldiers on all fronts viewed the war and how, as the years continued on and the ceasefires ‘ceased’ due to commanding officers disliking their troops fraternizing with the enemy, this moment is viewed as a remarkably peaceful act of humanity in one of the world’s most tragic and harrowing periods. Such an event deserves to be addressed as it was originally censored by the press before it was forced to be made public (ironically France was the country that hid it the longest), and plays and songs were created to pay tribute, but the first film to highlight this point of time was the 2005 French-language picture, Joyeux Noël (the French word for ‘’Merry Christmas’’). Set during the beginning of World War I, the film focuses on three different perspectives across three different fronts: Gordon (played by Alex Ferns), a lieutenant of the Royal Scots Fusiliers (an infantry regiment of the British army), Audebert (played by Guillaume Canet), a French Lieutenant in the 26th Infantry, and Horstmayer (played by Daniel Brühl), a Jewish German Lieutenant of the 93rd Infantry. As the fight continues on around the Christmas season, a brief respite comes in the form of Christmas Eve, whereas each section is sitting down to enjoy a quiet night, they overhear the sounds of German tenor Nikolaus Sprink (played by Benno Fürmann) singing across the trenches, prompting the bagpipe-playing Scotsman to join in on the festivities. After some hesitation, the soldiers go out into no-man’s-land and actually start to fraternize with the enemy soldiers, resulting in a peaceful night for very weary man. Problems arise however when the next day comes, with the opposing sides no longer being willing to mindless shoot people they just played a soccer match with, even to the point that the generals are second-guessing their decisions now. With the higher-ups demanding blood, will this monumental show of peace among men only be remembered as a prelude to more bloodshed? Doing favorably at the box office for its small budget and being nominated for Best Foreign Language film at the year’s Oscars, Joyeux Noël manages to earn some of its sappier elements and survive some of its undercooked story devices through a genuine human portray of a very moving part of history.

War films from Hollywood can be pretty repetitive, and even back in 2005, the genre was extremely popular among cinephiles and Academy voters (with one usually managing to get in somewhere in the lists of nominees when a big contender comes out). With this in mind, it’s more appreciated when one decides to try and stick out and be more than just an easy way to manipulate viewers with a familiar setting and bleak outcome. Joyeux Noël doesn’t contain a lot of the usual tricks you’d see in a war film as there’s very little shown of battle, gunfire, or even that much death (if anything, when it does feature these elements, they aren’t handled very well), instead deciding to shed light on the more passive moments along the trenches. You’ve seen war films of soldiers mingling with each other and reminiscing about their old lives (which they may never return to) and other films eventually would show the opposition’s perspective and reveal how they also wanted to return to normalcy, but the way this movie incorporate the different perspectives from the British, French and the German sides is handled quite effectively (which was probably helped out by the fact that this film is a co-production between all three countries). Despite the film being almost two hours in length, the pace of the film is very fast, with the audience not even realizing that they’ve reached the end point by the time it reaches its conclusion, probably due to the fact it feels more in line with a documentary than a feature film. This isn’t through any of the filmmaking or acting qualities as they feel appropriately cinematic, but rather in the narrative and delivery, which feels very barebones, presented in a very straightforward fashion, and isn’t sugar-coated with a lot of excess. The film does have doses of overly Hollywoodized elements in the opening and ending, which are played as overly sentimental and might come across as too phony, but the second the film showcases the Christmas truce, everything falls into place, and it feels so honest. There’s no background music, the shoots are kept at a mundane level, the acting feels very real, and little human touches like joining together in song regardless of a language barrier and finding peace on a quiet snowy night, really captures the essence of the season without needing to overstate anything. The directing and writing by Christian Carion don’t feel outlandishly different from other war features and might’ve fallen apart without these key moments, but due to them, it makes for a quick and simple, but very moving watch.

There aren’t a lot of characters to focus on in this film, and in a strange decision, the film doesn’t put a lot of attention on the regular soldiers, with them being more played in the background while the main characters of focus are the lieutenants in charge of each infantry. Sometimes this comes back to bite them, with an example like the character of a Scottish troop named Jonathan (played by Steven Robertson) who loses his brother in the war and refuses to take part in the festivities, as while this character has the workings to be something complicated and nuance, his lack of screentime and overacted delivery make him more of a bland irritation rather than a look at those who understandably couldn’t forgive and forget so easily. Most of the background roles are kind of like this, with people like Gary Lewis and Christopher Fulford playing characters that are at best poorly written, at worst over dramatic and annoyingly cartoonish, but the remaining roles do much better at working within the tone of the story and also have better writing to back them up. The three lieutenants are all pretty well handled, with each of them not feeling like basic cut-outs of their countries or just cinematic roles with an expected outcome, each coming together in a believable yet still hesitant manner. Both Guillaume Canet and Daniel Brühl in particular are given a majority of the film’s screentime and have the time to build a believable friendship, so you really get to know more about them throughout the picture, and their individual scenes are also quite good. Canet’s portrayal of a good-hearted man trying to fight to return to his wife and newborn child (who he doesn’t know the gender of) has a nice pay-off, his friendship with his batman named Ponchel (played by Dany Boon) is also done pretty nicely as Boon’s acting is lively enough to add levity without feeling distracting, and his scenes with his father (played by Bernard Le Coq) feel like some of the few scenes where an authority figure criticizes a soldier and it doesn’t feel like a complete cartoon. Daniel Brühl plays a German soldier which on the surface feels like a standard portrayal, but as more time goes on and you see the connection he forms with Canet’s role, it presents him as something far more complicated and a strong showcase of the German viewpoint of the time in regard to the war. Benno Fürmann is a fairly charming actor, who paired alongside Diane Kruger as his love interest, Anna Sørensen, results in a few nice moments (particularly whenever they are expressing their love or have to sing either together or individually), but their storyline ends on a pretty anticlimactic and empty note.

The movie’s budget was only about $22 million and despite being a war film where you’d normally see high-scale gun fights with rapid editing, sweeping cinematography and gruesome outcomes, nothing about this film screams like it needs a bigger budget and honesty benefits more from its softer approach. The scenes in the opening that do show a chaotic warfront are not handled very well, with editing by Judith Rivière Kawa and Andrea Sedlácková, and shot composition by Walther Vanden Ende that isn’t very seamless and makes it hard to keep track of what is on screen, but when the film decides to slow down and focus on the softer side of things, it feels like these talents are back in their element. There’s nothing shocking about the visuals or editing here, but everything is delivered in about as perfect a way as it could’ve been for a scene about this moment, as nothing is rushed, sloppy chopped together or angled at a weird manner just for the sake of things. Instead, the cuts are slower and allow for the moments to sink in, the shots are mostly kept at a lower medium angle to feel more on level with the people (outside of some larger wider shots that do a good job showing off no-man’s land or the large crowd of people), and the pitch black sky always engulfing the plains makes the location feel foreboding and the distant shelling keeps things a little apprehensive, but the pitch white snow contrasting that bleak awareness helps bring a sense of bliss, making it feel like a lost moment in time that might seem small, but is actually far bigger than anyone could’ve imagined. The musical score by Philippe Rombi isn’t featured that often, mainly because the film usually sticks to diegetic noises and songs to accompany the film (strangely the movie really works whenever someone is singing) and that might be for the best, as while the piece sounds decently constructed and nice and elegant, it probably would’ve added to the film’s overly sentimental issue.

It’s kind of bizarre that a war film is able to be classified as a Christmas film (especially because that sounds like a recipe for shmaltzy disaster), but Joyeux Noël really feels like it should be considered as one, not only because of how prominent the season is in the movie and since it takes place around the time, but also because it’s able to get across the meaning of the holiday through what it shows rather than what it says. Thinking back to World War I with a modern perspective is always so tragic, so it’s nice to see that even during such a bleak and messy period of history, a glimmer of light was still able to get through and this movie is able to present that in a way that certainly is sappy, but also honest at the same time. The film may be a little to-the-point and isn’t stacked with a bunch of plot or deep characters, but the solid performances, effective enough direction and a very strong portrayal of the truce itself, Joyeux Noël is a moment that is worth keeping in the memory banks.