And you thought your house was at war on Christmas.
While struggling to stay awake through foreign language Oscar nominee-and loser-
Joyeux Noël
, one wonders why France regularly forsakes its smarter exports (Agnès Jaoui's
Look at Me
, Arnaud Desplechin's
Kings and Queen
, Jacques Audiard's
The Beat That My Heart Skipped
, and especially Michael Haneke's
Caché
, to name a few from 2005) when annually submitting a film to our beloved Academy. Have the Frenchies lost their minds? Their taste? Their respect for American movie-goers and award-givers? Not so fast. The allies from Old Europe have most
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likely figured out that the voters from Old Hollywood gobble up cheese and nostalgia (remember last year's nominee
The Chorus
?), especially when the two are industrially blended into a historical drama based on actual events.
That said, the events in
Joyeux Noël
feel less like history and more like a politically correct pan-European wet dream: On Christmas Eve of 1914, French, German and Scottish troops threw down their weapons, climbed out of their respective hideouts, declared a temporary cease-fire and launched into a multi-lingual Christmas carol sing-along. Incredibly enough, it did happen, but the movie is so numbingly boring, so alternately stiff and mushy, that it's hard to be impressed. Material like this might have worked as a surreal comedy, and there are occasional, welcome flashes of humor (soldiers bicker over the nationality of a trench-hopping cat), but for the most part writer-director Christian Carion plays it painfully straight. If
Joyeux Noël
is not quite as turgid as Jean-Pierre Jeunet's
A Very Long Engagement
or as naggingly sentimental as Spielberg's overrated
Saving Private Ryan
, it's also a far lazier piece of work. The filmmakers expect us to be moved by the historical anomaly unfolding onscreen, but they present the situation with such earnest, TV movie-ish gloss that the result feels like much ado about nothing: Instead of a bold pacifist gesture fraught with risk, transgression and curiosity, we get a ho-hum holiday shindig in which enemies end up bonding over booze (fancy champagne is passed around) and babes (photos of wives left behind are proudly displayed). Maybe if there had been some mistletoe lying around, some of the lonely men in uniform might have veered into
Brokeback
territory-hey, anything to liven this party up-but things remain square and predictable the whole way through.
It doesn't help matters that the characters used to flesh out the story are as cookie-cutter as can be: There's the blandly vulnerable French lieutenant (Guillaume Canet, a sort of
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Gallic Patrick Dempsey), the blandly honorable German singer-turned-soldier (Benno Fürmann), and his blandly pretty opera-star lady love (
Troy
,
Wicker Park
, and
National Treasure
survivor Diane Kruger, who needs a new agent ASAP). When the latter breaks into an a cappella rendition of "Ave Maria" (or some such), defying the wintry, war-torn bleakness with her poorly lip-synced soprano, you may be tempted to make for the emergency exit. The only remotely interesting person hanging around is, unsurprisingly, the one least swayed by the holiday spirit: a grumpy German Jewish officer (Daniel Brühl) who, aside from admitting that he's indifferent to Christmas, gripes about the possible consequences of the truce. He's a bracing reality check amidst all the nobility and moralizing that strive to warm our hearts but actually sink the film (though if I wanted to be truly churlish I'd ask why the one Jewish character is such a party pooper). I'm being hard on
Joyeux Noël
, but an unusual story and good intentions don't eliminate the need for imagination, narrative energy and the occasional scene that doesn't end in a pat, accessible resolution. French cinema purists, consider yourselves warned.
