Review: Les Uns et Les Autres aka Bolero 1981 - an epic about our daily lives

Les Uns et Les Autres a.k.a Bolero 1981 - an epic about our daily lives

"There are only two or three human stories and they go on repeating themselves as if they had never happened before…"

Les Uns et Les Autres is one movie worth watching. Again and again. From the first scene till the last there is one big circle of events, people and lives. At just under three hours hours, Les Une et Les Autres is a long movie but these three hours are amongst the best three hours I have ever spent on cinema.  The story of Les Uns et Les Autres  may seem as if it is about artists being herded into war; though soon we come to realise the reality, that it is never the one soldier who fights the war against his state's enemy but his entire family which finds itself at war, with cruel fate. For what else is it to the mother of an infant when her husband is executed for trying to escape his POW camp a few hours before the official end of hostilities. Or when middle aged parents are told the heart wrenching news of the death of their sons in combat even as across the street their neighbour is welcomed back home from the war by his wife and children singing to the tune of a jazz orchestra. Incredulous juxtapositioning? Perhaps to the inhabitants of today's world, secure as it is from any large scale armed conflicts between nations, yes. But not false. And it certainly can and does happen.

Music is the binding thread in Les Uns et Les Autres. It is the story of four families and their friends over the course of 25 odd years. Three of the four families, one each from USA, France and Germany , are connected to playing music and the fourth, a Russian family, is associated with dancing to music. The characters (and their children and children's children) over the decades keeping walking in and out of each other's lives usually without anyone realizing their mutual connections from the past. And perhaps that is how it is in real life too and if it is or it isn't, how will we ever know,  after all , we don't realize the connections we share with other random people criss crossing our lives, because once we do realize the connection, they stop being random people. Ancient friendships which stains under the weight of things kept unsaid, and angry recriminations erupting at the wrong time, only to be bolstered by the feeling of camaraderie and bitter sweet memories. A badge of honour from the wrong man which will forever be an albatross around one's neck. People who know what to do to get by when the times change; who know how to bet on the winning horse every time but only for so so long for fortune is just one giant Ferris wheel. The stories of the War generation give way to the stories of the 60s generation and yet the stories are essentially the same  ...as if they had never happened before… the Ferris wheel keeps coming back. Even the ending of the movie comes back to the beginning.

One thing  I liked about the movie is that certain key scenes involve the supporting cast. In fact there are no protagonists, everyone who is shown in the movie has a significant role to play in some way just as in real life everyone is equally important, in a way. Comic relief is provided in the form of the two teenage brothers who can not give up on even the smallest of oppourtunities to throw punches at each other (in good humour) though ultimately there is a tragedy in this as well. The overall sense is one of tragedy. The last one hour moves quite quickly. Time loses its continuum and leaps back and forth, some scenes are genuinely confusing as the same actors play both the parent and the child or the grand parent and the child. This technique of narration takes some getting used to but fits perfectly into the overall "feel" of the movie. Some pretty solid editing manages to hold everything together.

There is minimal use of dialogues. Most of the narrative progression is through visuals and not through dialogues. Significant events, such as courtship and marriages, come to happen over the course of a few seconds. Yet, there a voice which does narrate certain events which are not shown to have passed but lead to other events in the chronological progression of the script. The narrative is mostly linear. Some of the dialogues are truly inspirational. Sample this one; "No man who has known war could ever start another. Those who start wars must know no friends nor lovers. Must be their way to get revenge on those who are happy."

Claude Lelouche's direction is fantastic. The way the focus moves from the key characters in the foreground to the supporting cast in the distant background brings out the significance those supporting roles have for the movie. Cinematography is quite good. Fantastic use of zooms to take the viewer inside the thoughts of the character on scree and at other times to fix the character inside the larger frame of things. My favourite such scene is the mental asylum scene shot through the window in which the camera follows a middle aged son as he walks towards his old and mentally ailing estranged mother siting alone on a solitary bench in the light of the setting sun. I loved the winding staircases which keep cropping up throughout the movie and the extremely wide angled fast moving circular shots of these winding staircases. Long shots where the camera follows the actor are also well suited to the overall aura of the story.  I liked everyone's performance in Les Uns et Les Autres, Geraldine Chaplin in particular has acted quite well. I felt she did a great job in Doctor Zhivago too. Actually everyone's dished out great performances.

I have added another great title to my list of all time favourite movies and I am sure Les Uns et Les Autres will touch every one who see it in one way or another.

And the dancing...did I mention the phenomenal dancing? Check out Jorge Donn move to Maurice Ravel's  unforgettable Bolero.

Oh! An there's even a glimpse of Sharon Stone thrown in for good measure.

82 prints of Los Desastres de la Guerra by Goya on an aimless Monday evening

Ultimately it was the faces. Just one look at the faces and I knew Goya had touched me deeply. He had made me feel the pain. The physical and mental pain of war. And the sheer futility. A waste.

I knew nothing of Goya before seeing this exhibition. I had ofcourse seen his famous work, The Shootings of May 3rd 1808. But I knew nothing of him, his style, his world. I had read some bits on the Penensular War in War and Peace but that was it. Then one aimless Monday evening I chanced upon an exhibition on a series of war prints by Goya. Goya, a Spaniard, was asked by a Spainish general to witness, and preserve in art, the attrocities being commited by Napoleon's troops in the cities of Zaragoza and Madrid during the Penensular War of 1808-1814. Goya went to the battlfields and the seiges and diligently, often in grave danger or under the protective cover of darkness, sketched out the scenes of agony and human suffering being played out before him. The outcome: a series of 82 prints called Desastres de la Guerra (Disasters of War).
I think each of the 82 prints influenced me immensely. The time I spent amongst them wasn't enough at all. I could look at these engravings over and over again; sometimes looking at Goya's excellent shading technique and his use of dark and light to highlight and conceal, at other times his forceful framing and  composition, and at other times just be lost in those scenes, feeling them, living them. Overwhelming.

The prints themselves are actually etchings/engravings called Aquatints.It think this is a great medium and coupled with Goya's mastery of technique makes for the perfect represtation of such a dark subject. Very effective.

If I was absolutely forced to pick 5 from the 82 prints which influenced me the most, these would be the prints I would select:

I have found a new favourite artist and also images which will always stay in my mind.

Know More:

The exhibition at the Instituo Cervantes - Click here
Goya  and the Desastres de la Guerra
The entire series of Los Desastres de la Guerra, in the correct sepia tone
Penensular War: Spain Vs. Napoleon

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Inglourious Basterds

In some senses Inglourious Basterds is a typical Quentin Tarantino movie with "Chapter" - based narrative, cinematic nods of acknowledgement to past movies from the same genre and comic relief blended into seemingly ultra-violent settings: (Col Hans Landa's sherlock-holmes-on-hormones calabash pipe compared to the Frenchman monsieur La Padite's rustic little briar-aspirant pipe did break the tension for the entire audience in my hall during the opening scene of Jew search visit). Everything from the title itself to the minor details is inspired but Inglourious Basterdsis definitely worth a watch.

What I liked about Inglourious Basterds is that it gives enough screen time to all the major characters. Though Brad Pitt features most prominently on the posters, to me his character appeared as just one of the many key characters in the movie. Lt. Aldo Raine, the Jew-Red-Indian heritage leader of the Basterds played by Brad Pitt, provides a lot of comic relief and sense of purpose. His southern Tennessee drawl, never ending search for Nazi scalps and matter-of-fact engraving of the Swastika on the foreheads of captured Nazis all help make him the most loved of all the characters with the audience. 

Sample this dialogue between Lt. Aldo Raines and Lt. Archie Hicox

Lt. Aldo Raine: You didn't say the goddamn rendezvous was in a fuckin' basement.
Lt. Archie Hicox: I didn't know.
Lt. Aldo Raine: You said it was in a tavern.
Lt. Archie Hicox: It is a tavern.
Lt. Aldo Raine: Yeah, in a basement. You know, fightin' in a basement offers a lot of difficulties. Number one being, you're fightin' in a basement!

However my personal favourites in Inglourious Basterds are Lt. Archie Hicox, the British German movie industry doctorate holder, played by Michael Fassbender, Bridget Von Hammersmark, the German movie diva played by Diane Kruger and Col Hans Landa, the "Jew Hunter" SS colonel, played by Christoph Waltz. I also liked the acting of the Frenchman Denis Menochet as the French dairy farmer Monsieur La Padite, hiding his Jewish neighbours in his cellar. In fact all the actors in Inglourious Basterds have done really well.

The English subtitles of the many German and French dialogues have been handled extremely well. There are many fast paced dialogues in German which have been executed superbly. Of course most of the cast involved in these is German anyway but it still needs an intelligent director to convert it into great reel time and Quentin Tarantino is more than up to the task here. My two favourite scenes from Inglourious Basterds are: the first opening scene where Col Hans Landa visits Monsieur La Padite and his three very beautiful daughters and the tavern scene involving the three basterds, Bridget Von Hammersmark and the SS Major Hellstrom. In both the scenes a lot about the characters is revealed, the tension slowly builds up, wooden tables are involved (ok that was stupid) and the outcome in each has great impact soon after. Both the scenes have German, French and English. The subtitles have been done well and more importantly the transition from German English and French English and back and forth is amazingly smooth. 

As a film, Inglourious Basterds is acutely aware of its audience being far removed in terms of time from the events of World War 2. Take for instance when the narrator explains the highly combustible nature of the 35mm films of the era of World War 2 and he starts with the words "In those days...". Even the need for the narrator to provide an explanation on this says a lot.Another example of this self-awareness is the pointing out on screen the key Nazi officials using animated arrows. These are not necessarily bad things to do, in fact these help to cut through the chase so to speak and highlight the significance of events immediately. Quentin Tarantino certainly knows how to endear his movies to his audiences. In some sense I would do the same if I was to make such a movie for today's audience...okay now entering the realm of day dreaming.

Films on World War 2 will not go out of style any time soon, they started soon after the outbreak of the Nazi Blitzkrieg in 1939 and haven't run out of steam yet. Apart from Inglourious Basterds, there are at least two Hollywood films on this theme set to be released within the next year (a remake of the 1955 Dambusters and the other being Little Iron Men). Inglourious Basterds will never be in the top rung of great World War 2 films and perhaps if a poll of such great films was to be held a decade from now, Inglourious Basterdsmay not make it into the top 20 but the current popularity of this movie can not be denied.

Where this movie really scores is that it seems to appeal a lot to a newer generation of movie-goers who have never heard of Patton or Tora Tora or The Longest Day or Dirty Dozen or The Eagle Has Landed et al and who couldn't care less about last year's bomb Valkyrie but who can easily sit through a Quentin Tarantino style rendition of almost anything be it a movie on World War 2 or on how a bride extracts sword-blade revenge or on the nuances of selling salted butter in Namibia or whatever. And in this sense Inglourious Basterdsnot only keeps the tradition of World War 2 movies alive but it will perhaps help re-introduce at least some of the above mentioned movies to a newer generation of film buffs. 

And then of course it has the legend of the Bear Jew.........."NEIN NEIN NEIN NEIN NEIN NEIN NEIN NEIN NEIN NEIN"

Post Script: - The black and white Nazi propoganda movie of Joseph Goebbels called the "Nation's Pride", which plays in Shosanna's cinema, was directed by Eli Roth, the character who plays the baseball bat wielding Bear Jew.


Another anachronism I noticed was when Col Hans Landa talks of precluding any chances of being tried by a Jewish court. In 1944 there was no Jewish state and the real possibility of such a state was quite remote. Further the question of a German colonel ending up in a Jewish court would also seems quite remote or non-existent at the time. Hence Landa's comment is anachronistic. However after the formation of Israel some Nazis were tried in "Jewish" courts the most famous such case being the trial of SS Lt.Col. Adolf Eichmann in the 1960s.

Brigadier and Brigadier General + John Nicholson

Brigadier General - Transient Throne

John Nicholson

and General Custer as a footnote

I have always been interested in the history of military and it was not entirely unnatural for me to ponder a bit on the sudden promotion of a Captain John Nicholson to the rank of Brigadier in 1857. This jump in ranks ultimately led me to understand a bit more of military ranks and of John Nicholson. Here's what happened.

While reading an account of the Siege of Delhi of 1857 I often came across the name John Nicholson. This is no surprise since to most of the British present at the siege and thereafter Nicholson was the first among equals in the line of heroes of the siege. He was one of Henry Lawrence's Young Men, each of whom was in the words of Philip Mason "Moses and Napoleon" - tax collector, magistrate, army commander, political officer, division officer all rolled into one; usually the only white face for hundreds and hundreds miles around his jurisdiction in the Punjab province or the North East Frontier Province.

Upon the outbreak of the Mutiny, Nicholson was a captain serving under John Lawrence (younger brother of Henry Lawrence), the governor of the recently conquered Punjab province. The Delhi Field Force was assembled on the ridge overlooking Shahjahanabad in May - June 1857; the Moving Column from Punjab joined up with the force to lay siege to Delhi in mid August and Capt. John Nicholson came in with the column. He fought alongside the rest of the British officers against the Sepoys and Mughals of Delhi who fought back with just as much ferocity. The next month was spent in an internecine impasse and finally the majority of the British officers voted for frontal assault on the walls of Delhi on the 14th of September with none other than Brigadier General John Nicholson to lead them.

"Eh?" me sputters in surprise,
"Brigadier General? But he was a captain wasn't he?"
me scans the last few pages skipping words and lines searching for the name John Nicholson and, yes indeed, he had been a captain till now. "So? Then? What just happened is the space of the last two lines to pole-vault him from Captain to Brigadier General?"

Turns out it's not such a big deal after all. I mean it is and yet it isn't. Let me explain.After years of conducting PhD. quality research, back breaking investigations and talking to retired and surviving army officers I have come to discover the following.

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There were at least four types of ranks in the British Army in India -
Substantive
Acting
Temporary and
Brevet.
A substantive rank is a permanent rank which governs the pay and allowances due to an officer. An acting rank is a rank awarded for a time which may or may not be converted into a permanent  rank; holding an acting rank allows for the higher pay associated with the higher acting rank to be given to a holder of a lower substantive rank. Thus a substantive Captain, Acting Major would be paid as per the pay scale of a Major. A temporary rank is exactly what is says - temporary, more on this below. Each of these three is a commissioned rank which means that the ranks is conferred on the officer by the ruling monarch or by the Board of Representatives (of the East India Company) or a similar such authority. A brevet rank however is not a commissioned rank. Other than by the usual channel above, it can also be awarded by the commander of the army for exemplary bravery and is ceremonial (though years of service as a brevet rank holder do go towards the calculation of seniority); it is however permanent and one can not be 'demoted' from a brevet rank just as the in case of a permanent rank.

The rank of Brigadier or Brigadier General was almost always a temporary rank. Brigadier was a rank awarded for a specific purpose (or mission) such as taking command of all the forces in a battle ie commanding the full brigade, commanding a section of a wartime activity (like arranging for troop recruitments or logistics) or acting as the commanding officer of group formed for a special task such as the Army Of Retribution formed to avenge the massacre of the Kabul Residency in the 1870s. Brigadier or Birgadier General was usually an emergency rank awarded for a task to be accomplished in the near future. This temporary rank was always withdrawn as soon as the task was accomplished. Hence, for example, any Colonel promoted to the rank of a Brigadier for a battle was always 'demoted' back to the rank of a Colonel after the battle.

As a useful digression I present here the military ranks in ascending order of hierarchy for the British Army in India and for the Army of the East India Company at the time of the Mutiny of 1857:

Subaltern - Ensign in Infantry and Cornet in Cavalry - equivalent to a modern day Lieutenant

Captain

Major

Lt. Colonel

Colonel

Brigadier - Brigadier General

Major General

Lt. General

General

The difference between the terms Brigadier and Brigadier General was due to the source of the temporary appointment. If the appointment was made by the monarch or his or her representative (Governor General or Viceroy for example) then the term used was Brigadier General. If appointment was awarded in the field on the authority of a senior General then the term used was Brigadier. Ultimately though this made little difference as the term was often used inter-changeably.

There could be no brevet-Brigadier since a temporary rank could not be awarded for bravery shown in past actions. The temporary rank was always awarded for some future intended outcome and not as a reward. Also brevet ranks were permanent, temporary ranks were, well, temporary.

Brigadier and Brigadier Generals are ranks still retained by the British and most Commonwealth armies though now these ranks are mostly permanent and substantive (not temporary) and no demotions can be made from this rank under normal circumstances.

Till now this is not such a big deal.

The Brigadier was usually the senior most Colonel from among all the Colonels present during the emergency. As can be seen in the hierarchy given above this rank was always somewhere in between that of a full Colonel and a Major General. As a matter of fact the Brigadier was and is still referred to as Colonel-General is certain armies. And this is where John Nicholson's advance from Captain to Brigadier is so unique. The man jumped at least 3 ranks and close to 15 years of service to become a Brigadier overnight. Brigadier John Nicholson superseded scores of other higher ranking Majors, Lt. Colonels and Colonel to become the commander of the assault party. He was made the supreme authority for the charge on the walls of Delhi and all officers (senior and junior) in the attack gladly accepted to follow his lead. The overall Commander of the Delhi Field Force was still Brigadier Wilson, senior to Nicholson in age and years of experience by many a decades, who supervised the attach from atop the Ridge.  Had Brigadier General Nicholson survived the assault he would had to go back to the rank of Captain after the completion of the assault. Incidentally the tombstone of John Nicholson gives the rank of the John Nicholson as Brigadier General (temporary) and not as Captain (substantiative). It is set in a cemetery named after him, located in an erstwhile Mughal garden situated just outside the Kashmiri Gate. It was this very bastion of the wall of Delhi which Nicholson attacked on the 14th of Sept 1857 and this is where he fell. Nicholson was fatally wounded at the beginning of  the road which connects Kashmiri Gate with Mori Gate, running along the arch of the wall which is in between these two gates. This road was named Nicholson Road.

I do not wish to spin off this post as an essay on the life of John Nicholson or on reputation and respect John Nicholson enjoyed amongst his British brethren and the Sikhs as well (check out the fanatical Sikh sect 'Nikel Sanis' loyal only to John Nicholson). And nor do I wish to dwell too much on his cruelty in dispensing punishment on the rebellious Sepoys.  I point the reader towards the rich encomiums showered in the thoroughly enjoyable memoirs of Lord Roberts of Kandhar and to other such memoirs written by the contemporaries of Brigadier General John Nicholson. It is also significant that the usually highly acerbic character of writer George MacDonald Fraser, Col Harry Flashman, who usually lashes away with his vitriolic tongue to decimate the reputation of all from Queen Victoria down to the lowest clerk in the far reaches of the Raj, doesn't sully the name of John Nicholson one bit when he recounts his encounter with the towering-heavily bearded frame of John Nicholson (in the Flashman series novel - The Great Game). Such is the stature of John Nicholson.

Another star on Nicholson's chest - a 150 years and one independence on, the cemetery is still called Nicholson Cemetery and the road is still called Nicholson Road. 


Interested reader (hint for detractors and other such folk) should also however lookout for (quite irrelevant and how-does-it-matter) charges of homosexual relations between John Nicholson and, another of Henry Lawrence's young men, Herbert Edwardes.


Walking along Nicholson road at dusk, the sky rife with hues of orange and rust lethargically blotting into one another merged further by the muezzins evening call, the wall of Delhi (still) stoutly standing on one side and an unending row of hardware shops with bored-to-death-owners-who-spend-their-whole-lives-staring-at-the-wall,siting inside on the other side with only about 15 feet separating the two, I could only think of how these shop keepers and the Kashmiri Gate wall are inextricably intertwined with the rank of Brigadier in my mind.

Another (not very useful but highly interesting) digression.

The famous American military personality General Custer was a  Lieutenant Cadet (Subaltern) at the start of the American Civil War in 1861 and was temporarily made a Brigadier General at the age of 23 years in 1863 just 3 days before Gettysburg. He also became a brevet Major General in the mid 1860s and his substantive rank at the time of the death in 1874 at Little Bighorn was Lt. Colonel. Now, finally these ranks make some sense, phew!

I suppose this also the right place to mention another place Brigadier General of the Indian Army (Imperial) - General Reginald Dyer of the Amritsar masacare of 1919. Brigadier GeneralDyer retired with the substantive rank of Colonel.

This post is very unstructured (can't help it; the rank of Brigadier and John Nicholson go hand in hand in my mind). Perhaps this post leaves no one in the world any wiser and nor does it do much to reverse global warming but it's just something I discovered and which led me further onto a never ending and superb journey into the world of the Raj and that is why I decided to commit it to paper, er, screen...yeah commit it to screen and to space of blogger's server.

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To know more:

1.  British Army in India and the rank of Brigadier General

Wikipedia on British Army

Wikipedia on British Army in India

Sahibs by Richard Holmes

Redcoat by Richard Holmes

A Matter of Honour by Philip Mason


2. John Nicholson


Soldier Sahib by Charles Allen


Wikipedia

Memoirs of Lord Roberts - download for free from gutenberg

Life of John Nicholson by J. Trotter

Encyclopedia Britannica on John Nicholson from 1911