Uranus

Claude Berri has given us some fine pictures in the past; this is one of his very best. Aymé's novel had been very cynical, Berri keeps the tone and adds some fiery acting by Depardieu as Leopold the doomed barkeeper to create a lovely film. Hiding a collaborator might have been the focal point of some other film, but here it's almost secondary to the vicious intrigue going on among Communists, Pétain fanciers and others who just want to survive. It's a delight to see Berri showing Rochard, the Communist stalwart who had denounced so many, reporting Leopold to the police as having given shelter to Maxime Loin, then Leopold hires Rochard to help him in the bar: very funny and very pointed satire.

The performances are all so good. Michel Galabru as the oily, vicious Monglat, the profiteer whom everyone fears but whom everyone curries favor with is superb. Fabrice Luchini as the doctrinaire Communist Jourdan has hollow cheeks and horrible button eyes; he looks like one of the demented saints in El Greco's paintings. Michel Blanc as Gaigneux, the more realistic Party member, is solid--he not only wants to navigate the swift currents of politics, but is looking for love from Archambaud's daughter.

WWII left of lots of scars in French memory. Right after the war, all the French were supposed to have been freedom fighters, minus a few baddies of course. Then, slowly, a different truth started to emerge, and since the controversy has been raging on. Uranus, written by Marcel Aymé right after the war, was always controversial, as is this modern adaptation by Claude Berri. In this half-destroyed (by US bombings) French village in 1945, people try to have their lives back, or to save themselves : communists, drunks, sadistic late-hour partisans, former antisemitic hate-mongers, war profiteers... These characters may be too theoretical to be convincing, and of course the permanent blurring of the line between the good and bad guys is too systematic. However, the superior acting and the fact that the movie still manages to raise difficult issues (the general tone is very misanthropic), make it very compelling.

This is the film which Claude Berri directed immediately after his world-famous pair of films based on Marcel Pagnol stories, JEAN DE FLORETTE (1986) and MANON DES SOURCES (1986). This film is based upon a novel by the well-known French author Marcel Aymé (1902-1967, 59 films having been made between 1934 and 2016 either based upon his works, or incorporating his written contributions to dialogue or scripts). The film contains spectacular bravura performances from both Philippe Noiret and Gerard Depardieu. Anyone interesting in seeing superlative acting by two of France's finest actors need look no further than here. They both have scenes of such shattering force and power that the screen shakes. Noiret's rant is a philosophical one, and is a real tour de force of writing as well as of delivery. This film deals with the tensions of a French village in central France subsequent to the end of World War II. 'Collabos', i.e. collaborators who aided and worked with the occupying Nazis, or who were officials of the ousted Vichy regime, are being rounded up and summarily executed by local committees, some official and some not. For the moment, the Communists are in control of the village, and they are the most bloodthirsty. Many cynical comments are made by the characters about how huge numbers of people not only now claim to have been members of the Resistance, but have actually faked papers and evidence to try to prove it, and thus escape being executed as collabos. In the midst of all this is the naive idealist Leopold, who runs a tavern, played by Depardieu. He is a man of no education who has become obsessed with a love of classic poetry and drama. He keeps quoting from Racine's 17th century drama ANDROMACHE and attempting to write properly scanned lines of original verse to add to it. He is framed by one of the Communists and arrested as a collabo. He has great difficulty extricating himself from this and the inevitable village firing squad. Everyone in the village is ratting on everyone else, except for the character played by Philippe Noiret, who sublimely attempts to ride above all the political passions and insists that there is some good in everybody. Many villagers have been billeted in their neighbours' home temporarily because their houses have been destroyed by bombing raids and they have nowhere else to go. The main square of the village is littered with rubble, and there are ruins of bombed houses everywhere. So high do the passions run that when a train arrives bringing home many young soldiers from prisoner of war camps, who have been absent from home for five years, one of the young men is savagely attacked and beaten in the middle of the welcoming ceremony because he was reputed to have been a collabo inside the POW camp. So everyone is going for everyone else, and it is not a pretty sight as we discover scandal after scandal about the villagers. Eventually we realize that the police have been 'bought' by a collabo profiteer, so that they will jail or kill anyone he wishes. Aymé's story is deeply cynical as an exposé of the corruption, hypocrisy, and viciousness of French villages, and we are shown just how horrible it is trying to get back to normal after years of occupation by a ruthless foreign power, when half the population have been collaborating with the oppressive invaders. As for the human stories in this film, they are as full of tragedy, irony, and hypocrisy as one could possibly imagine. The film is so well made that it is compulsive viewing, but it reveals much about human nature that most of us wish we did not have to know. And it is a sad, sad history lesson indeed. As for the involvement of Uranus in all this, it is as follows. Philippe Noiret was reading one night in his home when the bombers came and destroyed his house, killing his wife. He was saved by resting freakishly on a single beam which did not collapse with the rest of the house. At the time of the raid, he had been reading an astronomy book and was just at the point where he was reading about the dark and gloomy outer planet Uranus. Subsequently, he has had repeated nightmares about the bombing raid mixed with visions of Uranus, so that he became haunted by the gloomy planet, and it became to him the symbol of all that was wrong and horrible in life. This film is trying to tell the French people that Uranus can still haunt them if they do not come to terms properly with all the horrors of the War, the Occupation, the collabos, and the subsequent illegal and rough justice meted out by what were nothing less than politicised vigilante gangs, who were often bribed by corrupt criminals. And lest anyone think these subjects are exaggerated, let me remind everyone of the most famous Vichy official to successfully pose as a Resistance supporter after the War, and who thus fraudulently gained the adulation of the French public and became elected President of the Republic. His name was Francois Mitterand, and when the truth about him finally came out, we all learned that he had been the greatest hypocrite of them all.

Through "Uranus", director Claude Berri serves us on a silver platter French cinema crème de la crème: veterans Jean-Pierre Marielle, Philippe Noiret and Michel Galabru followed by Michel Blanc, Gerard Depardieu and Fabrice Luchini and a casting masterstroke with former TV comedian Daniel Prevost as Rochard the schmuck that started it all.

There are no heroes in that story, but just average men shining through their actions, reaction and at times, inaction... and I was surprised at the end to be able to feel the angst, torment, frustration, disillusion of each one of them as if they were protagonists, in fact as if I lived by their side during the Occupation whose aftermath is the backdrop of "Uranus". This is the uncompromising tale of men governed by their instincts, principles, fears, pettiness, greed, so many human elements that make the dichotomy of fear vs. Courage too simplistic to analyze what truly happened under Vichy government.

One shouldn't underestimate the complexity of the issue and its existential bearing on the national conscience. Basically, there were choices for French people who were not Jews: they could cooperate or even fight with the enemy, some women only had the misfortune to fall in love with German soldiers -which was deemed as horizontal collaboration. Or they could follow the call of General De Gaulle and join the 'maquis' to fight and sabotage the German's equipments and execute collaborators. And neither resistants or collaborators, the silent majority just 'let it go' like the Parisians who acclaimed Petain in April 1944 and then De Gaulle in August after the Liberation.

"Uranus" was written by Marcel Ayme who had shady occupations during that bleak era of the same name. And like in "The Sorrow and the Pity", it raises one important catalysis of that National shift: Communism. In Marcel Ophuls' documentary, a former militian admitted he fought with the Nazis because he couldn't side with Bolcheviks. The anti-Communist sentiment was so prevalent that it gave the party an aura of nobility at the end, it was at the right side of the fight and in that small town where the film takes place: the rising party is represented by three men: Rochard, a petty railroad worker, Jourdan (Luchini), a virulent teacher and faux-intellectual and Gaigneux (Blanc), a more modest but principled father.

These men couldn't have been more different, Rochard is an insecure man who spread rumors against local bartender Leopold (Depardieu) after one humiliation too many. He tells everyone that notorious collaborator Maxime Loin (Gérard Desarthe) is kept in his house. By the time he made amends it was too late, the party couldn't consent to ignore the incident or fire Rochard, Leopold had to be guilty. Jourdan is seen as a little mama's boy who reasons in terms of group and class while he never lived himself like a true working-man, as his colleague Watrin (Noiret) says "you're not gifted for life". Jourdan is the brain without the muscle, the thinker without the guts, diametrically opposed to Gaigneux disapproves constantly, neighbor of the Archambauds, the bourgeois family who happens to hide Loin.

The seemingly straitlaced father Archambaud (Marielle) is portrayed in a rather weird establishing moment, instead of disapproving his daughter (Florence Darel) for frolicking around with the son Monglat, he warns her against getting pregnant, but being the mistress or wife of a rich kid amount to the same. This shows the concussion left by the war, when the notions of morality were turned upside down. When Archambaud finds Loin, tracked like a dog, he can't resign himself to leave him for a certain death. He shelters him, makes him sleep with his son (not his daughter) and asks neighbor Watrin if he can use his bed as well. Loin was a ruthless collaborator but oddly enough, Archambaud's act seems if not heroic but brave.

In fact these little villages are totally remote from the usual narrative of "barbarity rid by WW2", that Communists are influent makes no difference than the Occupation and in a sort of twist of irony, the former collaborators became the 'resistants'. Everything is a lie in this world, even Leopold who claims to have been a resistant is reminded by the Police that his business worked with the Germans and the Jew he so-called kept was his nephew. In his mind "Leppold has nothing to blame himself for, he made money but still less than Monglat Se. (Galabru). As Leopold, Depardieu gives a boisterous and exuberant performance as if he was still channelling Cyrano De Bergerac, he plays a men who needs wine and words to fulfill his thirst and finds himself a new talent, to compose verses and alexandrines.

In this labyrinthine plot where stories overlap with a remarkable fluidness, Leopold and Watrin are the two men trying to escape from that dim reality, Leopold with self-destruction and creation (maybe echoing Ayme's mindset) while Wautrin tries to see good in everything and doesn't exhaust in mind in analyzing what goes beyond his power. He explains though that every night at 11;15, he thinks of that last page he was reading in an astronomy book, about the dark and cold Uranus, and keeps repeating the words he read when the bombs killed her wife who was in the factor's arms. Basically, "Uranus" is the mental state of a town that still live in total moral rumble, where men became so emasculated their women would gave themselves to the first stranger.

It's not ultimately surprising that Mrs. Archambaud (Daniele Lebrun) has an affair with Loin, who's in a position to judge anyone in such a context... it's a sort of matter-of-factly cynicism that remains truthful about human nature and Berri doesn't lecture these men, but the human nature in general, and the way it can express itself during exceptional circumstances... showing that there's a moment where bravery and cowardice are so banal they almost become interchangeable.

Acting of the very highest quality. If Depardieu ever merited an Academy Award this would have been the film, not Cyrano. The rest of the actors are of the highest standard, especially Philippe Noiret who has a superb scene where he explains how he has developed his peculiar vision of life. This film never got all the credit it should have probably due to the complexity of the characters. This reviewer believes that it definitely qualifies as one of Claude Berry's best films. It is a film that would have been more suitable for the 70s when complexity was still deemed desirable and tended to take precedence over uninterrupted action. Uranus is one of those war/post war films that one views once and never forgets, films such as "The Tin Drum", "The Grand Illusion", etc.