La Peur (2015)
Directed by Damien Odoul

Film Review

At the start of his career, French director Damien Odoul distinguished himself with his rural drama Le Souffle (2001), a film defined by some stark imagery and an oddly disconcerting poetic sense of the unreality of life.  These unsettling characteristics are to be found in his latest feature La Peur, a vivid depiction of the brutality of the First World War and its impact on those who survived the nightmare of this industrial scale carnage.  The film received the Prix Jean-Vigo in 2015, an award usually reserved for young filmmakers showing exceptional stylistic originality, but it garnered decidedly mixed reviews on its first release in France and fails to have as much impact as other recent French films on WWI - notably Christian Carion's unashamedly sentimental Joyeux Noël (2005) and Gabriel Le Bomin's grimly harrowing Les Fragments d'Antonin (2006).

Like Le Bomin, Odoul attempts to show us the immense psychological impact of the war on those who participated in it, but does so far less successfully and appears to be more concerned with the horrific spectacle of the conflict than in its human consequences.  Loosely based on Gabriel Chevallier's autobiographical novel of the same title, first published in 1930, the film offers a succession of startling tableaux which, whilst mostly impressive in their own right, don't quite add up to a coherent or satisfying narrative.  Most potent are the battle scenes, apocalyptic in their scale and terrifying brutality, although a few of these are marred by mediocre CGI effects which diminish the realism somewhat.  It is the images showing us the grim after-effects of the fercious ammunition exchanges (eerily lifeless wastelands strewn with eviscerated animals and mangled corpses) that are more likely to stay in the mind of the spectator and are more expressive of the futility of war.

It was Odoul's striving for authenticity that led him to cast predominantly non-professionals for his film.  The principal role went to first-timer Nino Rocher, and Patrick de Valette, who plays Ferdinand, one of the more fully fledged characters, is a clown by profession.  There is certainly a freshness and spontaneity to the performances, but the lack of acting experience shows in the more intimate scenes, which fail to engage at more than a superficial level.  This is the central weakness of La Peur - the cold detachment that Odoul shows in his mise-en-scène, coupled with some over-emphatic dialogue and mostly bland acting, makes the film feel distant and unengaging throughout.  Odoul is happy to shock us, but he seems curiously unwilling to engage our sympathies.
 
A more obvious failing is the central protagonist's monotonous voiceover which, self-conscious and laden with clichés, conveys no real sense of the terrible ordeal that has been lived through.  Odoul's misreading of history is also of some concern.  Throughout the film, he constantly stresses the innocence of the young squaddies ('poilus' as they are known in France), practically characterising them as lambs led to the slaughter.  In actual fact, most were willing volunteers caught up in the wave of nationalistic fervour which is accurately depicted at the start of the film (this is certainly true in the early years of the war, which is where the film is supposedly situated).  La Peur is a film that effectively evokes the senseless barbarism of WWI through Odoul's distinctively bleak poetry, but its crude simplifications, the absence of any personal identification with the subject matter and a paucity of genuine human feeling all prevent it from leaving much of a lasting impression.

Film Synopsis

The First World War has barely started when Gabriel, a young French conscript, is sent to the Front in 1914.  Here, amidst the bombs, the bullets and the endless mud, he will have more than his share of the horror of trench warfare, but his greatest enemy is the fear he must learn to tame in order to do his duty and stay alive.  Emerging from this ghastly adventure which has left him badly shaken and burning with anger, Gabriel must find a way to rebuild his shattered life and regain his humanity...