Imperfect Parfait
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday January 30, 1998
It's clear that Sydney cinemas have something to offer everyone when a film like Claude Berri's Lucie Aubrac is showing at the same time as Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot.
Berri's film is a WW2 romance which shows the charming sexy French defying the inhuman Germans. Das Boot brings us the hapless German everyman, as much a victim of the war machine as those on the other side.
An undemanding film which repeats the comforting cliches of the past 40 years, Lucie Aubrac charts the adventures of two Resistance fighters whose marriage remains true despite the best efforts of the nasty Nazis to tear them apart - stirring stuff in these times of soaring divorce rates and struggling single mothers.
Full of dappled French ambience, gleaming old cars, and gorgeous-looking actors, it is pleasant escapism for a Sunday afternoon. The intensity of wartime relationships, spurred by the frisson of imminent death and the excitement of dangerous circumstances, makes for mildly erotic romance.
A closer examination, however, might leave us wondering why films like this remain popular, 50 years after the war ended? Perhaps the very fact that it goes nowhere near the complexities of wartime experience is at the root of its appeal. In recent years, many French film-
makers have challenged the idea of the heroic French and the bad Germans. Jacques Audiard's A Self Made Hero, which was awarded the prize for Best Screenplay in Cannes in '95, was a careful deconstruction of the "Resistance myth".
"The French always represent themselves in the best light,"
Audiard told us at the time. "With this film I have tried to show the reality of the national character."
But Audiard wasn't so much attacking the French with his bleak tale of collaborators as he was shining light on human nature. None of us really knows why, despite the nobler impulses of human beings, we live in such a violent world. But it hardly helps to pretend that the enemy is some monstrous "other" - Nazis in jack boots, Khmer Rouge crushing spectacles, Muslims killing Christians.
The French were pretty good at killing the Vietnamese during the colonial era. Australia didn't even protest when Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1979. Throughout the '90s, most of Europe sat around procrastinating while "ethnic cleansing" ripped the former Yugoslavia to pieces.
Everyone is entitled to the pleasures of a pretty movie, but perhaps it wouldn't hurt to remind yourself as you swallow the Lucie Aubrac parfait, that the enemy is not so much "over there". The enemy is within.
Lucie Aubrac is screening at the Verona cinema in Paddington.
© 1998 Sydney Morning Herald