TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/091691/0916420.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.7 KB | 88 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 68

After War, a Witch Hunt


By RICHARD SCHICKEL

URANUS
Directed by Claude Berri
Screenplay by Claude Berri and Arlette Langmann


    Politics, as we all know, makes strange bedfellows. But
as a remarkably tolerant fellow named Archambaud (Jean-Pierre
Marielle) discovers in Uranus, even a determinedly apolitical
citizen can find himself sharing his nest with some oddly
disparate ducks.

    The time is spring 1945, the early days of France's
liberation from German occupation. The place is a small town
where a large number of people have been bombed out of their
homes. As a result, Archambaud and his family have a communist
(Michel Blanc) living in one room and a humanist (Philippe
Noiret) living in another. And soon enough they take in a Nazi
collaborator (Gerard Desarthe).

    The movie never satisfactorily explains how all these
natural enemies avoid bumping into one another outside the
bathroom door. But then they are, even the homegrown Nazi, very
circumspect people. Their tendency is to mutter their
ideological passions, not shout them. For they are, most
basically, village folk, more interested in restoring the
sustaining continuities of their lives than they are in
maintaining their high wartime dudgeons.

    Besides, Leopold (Gerard Depardieu), the town drunk who
also happens to be the town innkeeper, creates all the
melodramatic hubbub their little community can tolerate -- or
a good movie requires. A poet manque as well as a sometime black
marketeer, he has the manners of a thug and the soul of a
romantic. When he is falsely accused of harboring the
collaborator (and briefly jailed), his outrage, hugely comic but
strangely blackened around the edges, is marvelous to behold.

    Depardieu writes large what the other players in this
typically French -- that is, typically terrific -- ensemble
write small: the complexity of human motives at delicately
stated cross-purposes. To an American observer, accustomed to
watching actors struggle to find more than one dimension in
their movie roles, the sight of actors comfortably, gratefully
inhabiting contradictory, fully human roles is this movie's
great pleasure.

    It is, of course, the same bliss that director Claude
Berri offered us in Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring,
his adaptations of Marcel Pagnol's fictions. And indeed, Uranus
(it takes its title from the dark, cold planet) resembles those
limpid works in its setting, tone and sympathetic anatomy of a
provincial society.

    There is, however, an important difference. Uranus is
based on a novel by Marcel Ayme, not quite a Nazi apologist but
by no means an oppositionist either. He wrote his book as a
protest against the communist-led witch hunt for collaborators
that followed the war. The film makes the case against the
totalitarian intolerance of empowered Stalinism -- in French
practice it often amounted to a settling of personal scores --
with persuasive force.

    On the other hand, there are no Jews in this town, and the
film contains no reference at all to the Holocaust. "When it
comes to horror, all ideas are equal," Berri has the
intelligently spoken Nazi say. But that's too smooth a dismissal
of the terrible consequences of certain intellectual
abominations. Some ideas really are more equal than others in
their destructive power. Yet even as one condemns this
sophistry, one has to acknowledge Berri's courage in thinking
about what must be for him, as a Jew, the unthinkable. The
power, as well as the perversity, of his movie derives from the
same source: a need to reimagine a historical passage long since
encrusted with right-thinking cliches.