Memories of an Incredible Winter: On Christian Carion's Merry Christmas (Joyeux Noel)

by anna battista

It's Christmas Eve, 1914, and a truce is agreed upon among the French, German, and Scottish regiments fighting in the Flanders trenches. Christmas trees pop up on the German side, an ex-tenor intones "Stille Nacht", and somebody from the Scottish ranks starts playing bagpipes, while in the French trenches soldiers open champagne bottles. Food is shared, pictures of beloved wives shown, while a priest gives a service that will turn out to be the most important mass of his life. This is the plot of Joyeux Noel (Merry Christmas) by French director Christian Carion, of Une hirondelle a fait le printemps (The Girl From Paris) fame. The film is inspired by real events and by reading a chapter entitled 'The Incredible Winter of 1914' from a book by Yves Buffetaut.

In the movie, Carion focuses on just a few characters and how they live the clandestine ceasefire: German tenor Sprink (Benno Fürmann), his girlfriend, the soprano Anna (Diane Kruger), his officer, Horstmayer (Daniel Brühl), French lieutenant Audebert (Guillaume Canet), and Scottish priest Palmer (Gary Lewis). Sadly, the truce will have tragic repercussions on the soldiers and on their lieutenants, as fraternizing among enemies is a treasonous act.

Though Carion's film hasn't got the power of the greatest WWI movies, such as Abel Gance's J'Accuse! (1919), Lewis Milestone's All Quiet On The Western Front (1930) and Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937), and, at times it suffers from lacking a strong plot and having a somewhat oratorical screenplay that features many basic dialogues, it is a heartwarming film with some genuine moving moments. Well-performed, touching and somehow realistic, shot in three languages, Merry Christmas is an epic film with a lot of vitality, as the nomination for a Golden Globe in the Best Foreign Language Film category and the 20-minute standing ovation from the audience at the Cannes Film Festival proved.

Joyeux Noel is a great story about politics and the inhumanities and irrationalities of war, above all, it's about a group of men, portrayed neither as heroes nor cowards, but as ordinary men who don't seem to live the same war, yet can understand each other and accomplish peace.