Zut alors! WW1 drama Joyeux Noel arrives under a big black wintry cloud, having been selected to represent France in the Best Foreign Language Film category over the much-hyped March of the Penguins at the 2006 Oscars. Insane, they said! It can't be done, they said! As co-producer Jean-Francois Camilleri fumed, Penguins (France's most successful export at the US box office) was "finally a foreign film that Americans love. It just proves the stupidity of French politics in this profession."
Well, sour raisons to yeaux and yeaux and yeaux: unwanted child Joyeux Noel is a joy from start to finish and should hold its head up high against those rambler birdies in dinner jackets.Mostly, we should give thanks and praises that Ron Howard didn't get his hands on it first.
Here's a more-or-less authentic account of that near-mythical Christmas in 1914, when Scottish, French and German soldiers proclaimed a temporary armistice, swapped champagne and cigarettes and played footie together ("looks like trouble for the Jerries", a Scottish soldier observes wryly, like a dug-in Des Lynam). From the sickening horror of No Man's Land, to the elegiac carolling of the bagpipes - and the almost off-hand revelation that Bruhl's German captain is Jewish - everything here is perfectly judged.
There's humour here too, albeit of the slightly mordant variety, and even the appearance of a local French farmyard cat, claimed by each side as their own, doesn't upset the potentially fatal juggling act.
In the midst of this, a living snow angel (Kruger) delivers an ice-melting burst of opera, the impact of which you can blame on a bad cold. The denouement, in which the troops are judged by the superior officers as having been guilty of "high treason" is underscored only by an excoriating sermon by Ian Richardson's Bishop who, far from applauding his priest's generosity of spirit (having delivered "the most important mass I ever gave"), reminds his chastened men that Christ came "not with Peace but with a sword"; that these Godless Germans should be cut down, every man, woman and child. Subtle it ain't, but it does act as a sobering reminder of the Church's culpability in both World Wars.
Ultimately, Joyeux Noel achieves the near-impossible, by keeping the treacle to a minimum while leaving one in no doubt about the finer aspects of humanity. Utterly magical.
Well, sour raisons to yeaux and yeaux and yeaux: unwanted child Joyeux Noel is a joy from start to finish and should hold its head up high against those rambler birdies in dinner jackets.Mostly, we should give thanks and praises that Ron Howard didn't get his hands on it first.
Here's a more-or-less authentic account of that near-mythical Christmas in 1914, when Scottish, French and German soldiers proclaimed a temporary armistice, swapped champagne and cigarettes and played footie together ("looks like trouble for the Jerries", a Scottish soldier observes wryly, like a dug-in Des Lynam). From the sickening horror of No Man's Land, to the elegiac carolling of the bagpipes - and the almost off-hand revelation that Bruhl's German captain is Jewish - everything here is perfectly judged.
There's humour here too, albeit of the slightly mordant variety, and even the appearance of a local French farmyard cat, claimed by each side as their own, doesn't upset the potentially fatal juggling act.
In the midst of this, a living snow angel (Kruger) delivers an ice-melting burst of opera, the impact of which you can blame on a bad cold. The denouement, in which the troops are judged by the superior officers as having been guilty of "high treason" is underscored only by an excoriating sermon by Ian Richardson's Bishop who, far from applauding his priest's generosity of spirit (having delivered "the most important mass I ever gave"), reminds his chastened men that Christ came "not with Peace but with a sword"; that these Godless Germans should be cut down, every man, woman and child. Subtle it ain't, but it does act as a sobering reminder of the Church's culpability in both World Wars.
Ultimately, Joyeux Noel achieves the near-impossible, by keeping the treacle to a minimum while leaving one in no doubt about the finer aspects of humanity. Utterly magical.