Joyeux Noël- ****

France’s pick for the 2005 Best Foreign Film Oscar was Joyeux Noël, a film about the Christmas Truce of 1914. While the actual event took place on a 27-mile stretch of the western front, writer/Director Christian Carion only focuses on one small area of the trenches. This is where the French, the Scots, and the Germans have holed up outside a small farm, and are waiting for the other one to make a movie.

The movie works best when it dips into slight satire, as the opening scenes of school children reciting mantra of killing the enemy at all costs. The single best scene in the film is near the end, when a Christopher Lee-ish bishop gives a speech about how all Scots must kill the Germans in the name of Christ. Carion takes the Joseph Heller tack of making those in command look like evil buffoons, leaving the war to the men who would rather not be in the trenches.

But Carion’s movie isn’t as concerned with the anti-war satire as he is with anti-war sentiment. He even professed to leaving one true scene out, a cat being shot for treason after Germans use it to deliver a message to the French, because it seemed a little too ridiculous. I will admit that his replacement scene in the film struck me as a bit ridiculous, and I was surprised to find the truth was even more inane. It’s a story that could’ve been used to great effect, but Carion is more concerned with are the men in the trenches, who look past the war and find that their enemies aren’t so inhuman after all. This sounds really cheesy, and it even is at times, but the sentiment is handled very well. While I would’ve rather seen a more satiric look at the Christmas Truce, what we get is nothing to be scoffed at.

The film opens at the beginning of the war, and we see the characters we will follow. A German couple, both opera stars, who are split by the war, two Scottish brothers and their parish priest, and a reluctant French Lieutenant who has had no news of his wife or their child. After a disastrous attempt at taking the German trench, the armies have hunkered down and are tensely awaiting the next move. But on Christmas Eve, when a Scottish song is answered by singing from the Germans. Soon they are singing together, leaving the trenches, and fraternizing with the enemy. They return to their trenches at the end of the night, but the next day find themselves reluctant to start killing each other again.

This is an interesting idea I wish Carion would have explored more- the need to keep the enemy faceless. Carion is more concerned with giving a face to each of his main characters, even if he doesn’t give them much else. Giving us two or three main characters from each army renders the movie unable to go too deeply into any one person, but the performances are good enough to overcome this. Even Diane Kruger, who proves that she’s a much better actress in her native tongue (we don’t get any of the flat readings like her character in Troy, but the dialogue isn’t as bad as Troy either). The performances manage to deepen the characters in a way that the script can’t. So even at its most tear-jerky, we buy it.

This makes the movie overcome many of its problems. Okay, so maybe they are the nicest trenches anyone has ever seen. Maybe the film does ignore the fact that the French were more reluctant to participate in the truce (since it was their country being ravaged and occupied). Maybe it is a little silly that a beautiful woman is not only able to get to a trench, but is then only looked at with polite awe instead of malicious intent. There are scores of complaints to be made about the film, but in the end it all works. Thanks to some great performances and an earnestly heartwarming script (as opposed to the usual American beating-over-the-head-with-the-CRY-NOW-hammer), Joyeux Noël manages to rise above its faults. It may not be the most realistic movie, but it’s a great introduction to a rather quiet, interesting episode of a very brutal time.