Week-end à Zuydcoote

It takes real skill to make such an inherently dramatic story so damn boring and utterly drained of all interest and vitality.

The amazing shooting location, the vintage fighter planes, the explosions, the hundreds or thousands of background extras... all wasted on a film with no story. In place of a story, they give us a random string of random encounters between random people who talk and talk, and then talk some more about nothing. They walk and talk. They sit and talk. They smoke and talk. They drink and talk. And then some bombs go off, or some Messerschmitts fly low and strafe the soldiers. And then we're back to pointless talking. This is not a film. It's two hours of footage.

And it's unfortunately characteristic of a particular kind of French film (especially a 1960s French film) where we get a cast of automatons who don't at all resemble real human characters but go around engaging in inane chit chat or robotically spouting meaningless philosophical musings or dialectics. It's so 60s. It's so French.

I found myself distracted by the background of the continual movements of squads of soldiers, aimlessly marching backwards & forwards, in opposite directions, for no obvious reasons & completely oblivious to the presence of the three principal characters.

17 Feb 2008

I have just discovered that my revered Professor Robert Merle had passed away in 2004, and I feel a pinch in my heart.

He taught English Literature at the Paris University. He wrote his PhD thesis on Oscar Wilde and made some astounding revelation and discoveries, at that time. But he taught us also Shakespeare, Jane Austen, etc. My love of Austen' s novels come from sitting at his lectures.

At the beginning of WWII, Prof. Merle fled the debacle of the French Army; on the beach of Dunkirk he managed to get himself on the English boat that took him to free London, and this true story his very well depicted in "Weekend at Zuydcoote", which is a true biographical story, and very well played by Jean-Pierre Belmondo. I must say that he was twice taken prisoner by the Germans and interned in POW camps, from which he tried to escape. He told us, I remember very well, that we should be aware of sleeping on concrete slabs, but sleeping on wood was quite healthy. I did remember this good advice 20 years later...

He was a strong supporter of the Algerian Ben-Bella, who was of course murdered in a plane crash : if a man loves his country and wants the best for it, he should be killed.....

The late Professor Robert Merle, the tremendous author of "The Day of the Dolphin", and others, was a great lecturer; I will always remember his jokes, good humor and immense knowledge of the English Literature.

I am sad he is gone; I feel a slice of my youth is gone with him, even though I do have all the softening memories.

It is really amazing that what was one of the biggest popular successes of the 60s in the French cinema has only one review on the IMDb! So here is my little contribution.

For those who have seen the recent "Atonement", the story will look familiar as the film is about one of the darkest episodes of WWII (i.e. the retreat of British and French troops at Dunkirk in June 1940), an episode evoked perhaps too briefly in the British film. In June 1940, British and French troops fighting against the Germans in Northern France were forced to retreat to the coastal town of Dunkirk and its suburbs. Their only hope of escape was to cross the Channel to England, but the boats were scarce and all the time they were attacked from the air by German fighter planes. This is literally the background for the whole movie. During two hours, we follow a young soldier named Julien Maillat through what was actually a terrible mess. Based on the first novel by Robert Merle, which was awarded the Goncourt Prize (the French equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize), "Week-end à Zuydcoote" is a realistic and grim portrayal of war. Merle himself was trapped on Dunkirk's beaches in 1940, and this brought a touch of authenticity to his work. Besides, when most war films depict glory and victory, this one is about defeat and loss. Therefore, the movie is not about battles between armies of nameless soldiers; it shows instead the boredom, frustration, fear and anger of ordinary human beings - all compressed into a turbulent two day period. That being said, don't expect one of those French "high brow" films! Henri Verneuil was an excellent filmmaker who knew how to make a real blockbuster (as this one proved to be). Although I never regarded him as an original nor even a prominent director, "Week-end à Zuydcoote" is perhaps his best effort. Well served by an excellent cast (leading man Jean-Paul Belmondo in one of his best parts, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Pierre Mondy as a gradually repulsive swindler...), the movie has benefited from Henri Decaë's exceptional cinematography and Maurice Jarre's fine score. Verneuil has managed to construct a believable reconstruction of the episode, which matches some of the best Hollywoodian movies on that period. The weak point (and this prevents me from giving this movie a 10/10) is the story that unfolds around the encounter of Maillat (Belmondo) and a young woman (Catherine Spaak) who resolutely refuses to leave her home in the suburbs of Dunkirk. This part of the movie seems artificial. While Verneuil is very good at depicting the protagonists' experiences, he proves to be clumsy with this segment. In spite of this minor flaw, "Week-end à Zuydcoote" is a thoroughly enjoyable show and a bitter reflection on war.

The 1964 film, though today largely unknown outside of specialized circles, stands as a quietly monumental work within the WWII combat subgenre. While it may not reach the lofty heights of general cinematic masterpieces, it undoubtedly earns its place as an iconic entry in war cinema-an essential reference point for those seriously interested in the micro-histories of retreat, disillusionment, and psychological collapse during the Second World War.

At the helm of this rigorously composed narrative is Henry Verneuil, whose directorial precision orchestrates every element of the film with disciplined clarity. Known also for his work in The Vultures (1967) with Belmondo, The 25th Hour (1967) with Anthony Quinn, and the tragicomedy The Cow and I (La Vache et le Prisonnier, 1959) with Fernandel, Verneuil brings to this project a deep familiarity with WWII as cinematic material. His direction is not flamboyant but exacting: every scene calibrated, every moment weighted, yet never forced. He avoids the self-indulgence of spectacle, opting instead for a control that supports the atmosphere of entropic desperation. What might easily become bombastic under a less restrained hand remains grounded, tense, and narratively honest.

Much of this effect is achieved through a production design of remarkable ambition and detail. The film's mise-en-scène is rigorous in its materiality. Uniforms are rumpled, gear is missing, firearms often seem useless or ornamental. There's no fetishization of military paraphernalia, and the usual iconography of the war film-the helmet, the rifle, the rucksack-appears worn to the point of farce. This isn't a war fought by professionals but endured by individuals ill-prepared, psychologically and materially, for the collapse of order. The visual texture of decay is pervasive: sand clogging weapons, mud blending into blood, smoke blurring the horizon. The visual field itself becomes unreliable.

Within this visual disintegration, the scale of the production asserts itself with a kind of functional elegance. This is clearly a large-scale undertaking: a generous deployment of military vehicles, well-managed crowd scenes, elaborate stunt choreography, and frequent, well-timed explosions that never tip into gratuitous excess. The abundance of extras and the convincing replication of chaos serve not as an indulgence in spectacle, but as a reinforcement of thematic disarray. These elements are executed with such balance and control that they become organic to the narrative's internal logic. This is large-scale filmmaking without triumphalism-a vision of wartime collapse rendered with logistical precision.

Verneuil's orchestration of this notorious chapter-the chaotic withdrawal at Dunkirk and the perilous maneuvers that characterized it-is nothing short of masterful. It's a depiction that refuses to mythologize the moment, and instead captures the exacting disintegration of structure and morale. In doing so, the film distances itself from the celebratory narratives that often attend portrayals of this event, especially in Anglophone cinema. This is not Dunkirk (1958), where adversity ultimately underscores collective endurance. Here, the fragmentation is total, and Verneuil ensures that every stylistic and material choice drives that point home.

Through a subdued yet uncompromising aesthetic, and a narrative architecture that refuses the comforts of clarity or closure, the film makes its mark not by shouting, but by eroding the very ground beneath its characters. It is in this erosion-meticulously framed, meticulously rendered-that Verneuil's vision finds its most haunting expression. The result is a film that, while never straining to impress, leaves a deep and persistent impression: a work of remarkable craft, rare thematic discipline, and lasting resonance within the canon of WWII cinema.