One of Stanley Kubrick's many great films is Paths of Glory, which examines the lethal hypocrisy of military politics during World War I France. Captain Conan is a more recent French film that works the same themes, except that the soldiers facing a court-martial are not necessarily innocent.
Captain Conan (Phillippe Torreton) leads a French guerilla unit that terrorizes the enemy near the Bulgarian border. Conan and his men do great service for France during the war, which comes to an end with the November 1918 armistice.
But the soldiers are not sent home, back to their farms and factories. Instead they are shipped to Rumania, part of an eventual hundred thousand French troops that would fight a yearlong undeclared war against the Russian Bolsheviks. Conan's men cannot adjust to their new roles as peacekeepers. Their provisioning raids become an embarrassment to the French army. Conan's scholarly friend Norbert (Samuel LeBihan) is appointed to prosecute them.
Norbert is sympathetic to Conan, and is aware of the hypocrisy of lower ranking soldiers sentenced to death despite the greater crimes of their superiors. But Conan and Norbert have an inevitable falling out. Some of Conan's unit commit a brutal robbery of a nightclub patronized by French officers, with the deeply cynical Conan defending the actions (and identity) of the culprits.
Captain Conan examines what the role of a soldier really is. Conan is scornful of professional soldiers who only do as they are ordered. He believes that the war was really won by aggressive guerilla bands such as those that he commanded. His cynicism about a soldier's civility and duty is shared by his superior officers, who regard soldiers as selfish, criminal rabble in need of harsh discipline.
Nobody sees soldiers as innocents, but there is disagreement as to their accountability. High ranking officers prefer to pick out 'bad soldiers' at random for execution, as an example or warning to others. Norbert is too conscientious for such injustice, but he sees the need to stop the criminality. Conan seems to believe that his men are above the law, with their illegal actions necessary to sustain the battle against the enemy.
As is the case with the court-martial films Paths of Glory and Breaker Morant, brutal war scenes are present but do not dominate. Captain Conan depicts war as chaos, resulting in hand-to-hand combat that is won by the more vicious side. Hand held cameras are used for the battle scenes, which make the observer feel like a participant.
Captain Conan is in French and Romanian but has English subtitles. The story is often difficult to follow. Sometimes, it is difficult to tell in what country a particular scene takes place. There is the usual difficulty in distinguishing characters, when the entire cast is unfamiliar and there are always subtitles to be read. However, the film is deserving of the effort required for its comprehension.
Director Bertrand Tavernier previously explored post World War I France with the film Life and Nothing But (1989).
Captain Conan was predictably ignored at the Academy Awards. The French equivalent is the Cesar Awards, which named Torreton as Best Actor and Tavernier as Best Director. The film received six other Cesar nominations, including Best French Film and Best Writing (Jean Cosmos and Tavernier). (67/100)
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