Capitaine Conan

This is a film which is worth viewing several times, for - like in a good novel - interesting details appear at each new viewing. By the way, the eponymous novel by Roger Vercel is excellent! This is my fourth viewing and this time I have been fascinated by the story of Jean Erlane (played by Pierre Val), the son of a good family with a Naval officer father and an Aviation pilot brother who both died fighting for France. Jean, who himself volunteered to join the Army, proved in action to be an irrepressible coward - to the point of being condemned to death by a Court Martial for desertion and transmittal of secrets to the enemy. The delicate matter of cowardice as a medical condition is approached, but obliquely. The reconstitution of the fateful night when Jean Erlane went to the Bulgarian lines, made on-site by the three men implicated in his trial - Samuel Le Bihan (as Lt Norbert, his prosecutor), Claude Brosset (as Father Dubreuil, his defensor), and Philippe Torreton (as Capt. Conan, the combat expert and witness of the night's events) -, is a magnificent moment of cinema. The whole movie is an excellent depiction of Army life during a war, with its glorious moments, its awful massacres, its long periods of tedium in far away places, its comical episodes and its instances where troops become unruly, at times up to the point of utter banditry. The main actors are all very good in their roles as officers, belonging to a generation where all male Frenchmen were familiar with things military, having undergone compulsory service (and for some of them the war in Algeria); but maybe Claude Rich (as Gen. Pitard de Lauzier), somewhat overplays his part of an inept and exasperating General! The filming of Bertrand Tavernier is very realistic and one gets gripped by the story, so that the two hours pass like a breeze. ___ .

Captain Conan is about... Captain Conan and his unit get sent to Bucharest? After the armistice for the Macedonian Front has signed and during this time, the men get restless which causes crime from Conan's unit to spread around the place as; Norbert (Conan's close friend) becomes judge advocate and picked to court martial these men and, while his friendship with Conan slowly dissolves from this moment.

Review: The film is excellent at showing it's message on how war is bad in not shouting it out but, observing why it's bad as the film is firmly accurate with some humour from the cast But is slow.

This film is about how the military experience can transform a person, and no, it's not about the army making men out of boys.

Conan leads a group of trench cleaners, who, in reality, were thugs and pathological killers who enjoyed butchering their enemies after infiltrating their lines at night.

Problems emerge when the war is over, but some of these men cannot deal with their wartime homicidal pathologies and keep doing what they were trained for and mount a heist which results in killings.

Conan then has to choose between his camaraderie for his men and his responsibilities as an army officer.

This film has many originalities, especially in its war scenes and, I must admit, the whole thing is entertaining.

It's lengthy at times, but Torreton gives a great performance and really deserved the Cesar for best leading role that he got that year.

It is, in my knowledge, the only film which treats of that very particular post-World War I episode, when the "Reds" tried to invade Bulgaria and the French came to stop the expansion of what was not yet know as the Soviet block.

Tavernier is probably the greatest film artist working in the world today. With Capitaine Conan, he accomplished what all the New-Wave directors dreamed about but never quite got the chance to do (except maybe for Bertolucci on The Last Emperor, if you want to consider him part of the original new-wave): to make a high-budget film with thousands of extras and elaborate, detailed sets which completely conforms to their vision and stays uncompromised, an auteurist epic. Well, how's this for uncompromised: Most of the shots in this film are made using only available light or the light that would be available given the circumstances of the scene! As a result, the film looks uniquely dark and authentic, as if it was shot in 1918 when the events took place. This takes some getting used to, and of course, people conditioned to being spoon fed every scene lit up like a christmas tree will be disoriented, but the shadowy effects achieved far outweigh the negatives. Some of the shots are kept in total darkness (as they would be in real life) with barely a face showing to indicate who's talking to who! Then the people gradually come out of the darkness into different shades of light, each more nuanced than the other. The cinematography and art direction are breathtaking; there isn't a single shot in the entire film that couldn't be called a masterpiece of its own, perfectly framed, perfectly composed and perfectly moved. Tavernier rarely uses a shot-reverse-shot preferring complex camera movement or long uninterrupted takes capturing the scenes from different angles without a cut. The scenes themselves, however, don't drag on forever, they are compact and to the point, making a Tavernier film usually one where a lot of things happen very fast and in order to pick up all the details and nuances, many viewings are essential. The acting from the awesome leads of Thoreton (a richly deserved Cesar award for best actor), Le Bihan, and Le Coque, down to the smallest bit player is uniformly brilliant. No American film I've ever seen has acting on this high a naturalistic level.

The film is mainly about the thin and precariously balanced area called 'amorality' that some people have a knack for staying within, racking up only enough whites (good deeds) and blacks (bad deeds)to stay mostly in the perfectly shaded middle gray. In a war-time situation the people who have this knack tend to do very well for themselves. Conan, a tough special forces officer whose group makes sneak attacks on the enemy and kills at knife-point, is that perfect 'amoral' character or for lack of a better term people have come to call an 'anti-hero', i.e., that guy who sometimes does 'bad' or 'evil' things, but integrates this within a higher integrity that's essentialy 'good' and admirable. His friend, Lt. Norbert is the more traditionally 'moral' man who comes to admire the guts it takes for Conan to operate rather openly in that precarious zone against all the hypocrisies of his superiors (which keep them protected). When Conan comes to defend a few of his men who have clearly gone over the line and committed atrocities which must be punished, Norbert, given the job of prosecuting the men, makes his position clear and breaks with him. All through the film he tries to become more like Conan and yet stays wary of the line that Conan could easily cross into madness and fanaticism. What draws Conan and Norbert together is their common integrity against the hypocrisies of society, as opposed to Lt. DeSceve, the other main character, who's an honorable soldier and strong man, but who kisses-up to the top brass and has a fascist attitude.

This film never got the distribution it should have in the U.S. simply because it was a subtitled foreign film and Americans have practically stopped watching foreign films! What a damn shame! They missed the greatest film of the '90s! I would conjecture that not 1 out of a 100 people who've seen Spielberg's melodramatic "Saving Private Ryan" have even heard of "Capitaine Conan." Catch it on the Sundance channel on cable or rent it on video and experience a true masterpiece. Then watch it again and again and experience deja-vu.

Capitaine Conan by B.Tavernier:

Captaine Conan by B.Tavernier is certainly a great moie. The story takes place during the WW1 in the French's army. French's army go into European West and notably Romania, the Balkans, up to Russia. One of the officer , Captan Conan led a special force composed of murderes,criminals. This special force group commites sneak attacks and kills the foes by hand. In Budapest they are bored and commite criminal action.. When I saw this movie, I was fascineted by the way war scenes are filmed. Tavernier films "craggy" landscape in the Balkans to give the impression of a busy war. The special's effect as canon shoot, bombs add to this fabulous spectacle. On top of that, the director dwells on this dark period with dim scene. It participates in the tragic atmosphere and certainly in the total realism of this movie. It obviously an emergency in the French army and its hypocrisies. Its silly organisation critisized throught commandant Bouvier, a stupid man. Actors are exellent for instance P.Torreton as Captain Conan with his witty eloquence. This is a magnificient movie in spite of the lack of communication about the context which losts spectactors.

Briefly by this movie Tavernier fullfills a successful career. This movie as La princesse de Montpensier occurs in the margins of history. It is why he declared " I want to film histor at man size"