Retour à la vie

The first film made up of sketches made by different directors.(unlike Duvivier's works ).All deal with the return of prisoners in their native France after WW2.Of course the quality is uneven,but all are perfectly acceptable,some highly commendable.

SEGMENT ONE:The return of Aunt Emma or "Will evil never end?"

Aunt Emma comes back from the Concentration camps .Her psyche is shot,she's lying on a bed ,she hardly utters one word ,and she has only eaten a "Petit Beurre" (French biscuit)..Enter her family: they seem to come from a Maupassant short story.False smiles,false compassion,false emotion .Gaston (Blier) seems the good guy whereas Charles (Lucien Nat) seems despicable.But all in all ,both strive towards the same aim:make pitiful aunt Emma sign the papers so that they' ll be able to latch on to their inheritance.

This is Charles Spaak at his most ferocious and André Cayatte's directing is up to scratch.The way he films aunt Emma is stunning and the last picture (her face as the light fades out) reveals all the horror she endured ...no flashback needed.

SEGMENT TWO:the return of Antoine or "eight women and more"

Antoine (François Périer) finds again his job of a bartender in a hotel but the place has been commandeered by an English all female regiment.Probably because of censorship,the story never takes off .Probably intended as a comic relief,it's not really funny ,in spite of Périer's talent.

SEGMENT THREE: the return of Jean or " horror is timeless". By far the best short of the lot.HG Clouzot was a genuine genius of the cinema ;in his relatively small output, with the eventual exception of "Miquette et Sa Mère" ,he never produced anything mediocre.In "the return of Jean,he's at the top of his game .Unlike the other sketches,this one is timeless and could happen anywhere any time.A more recent work such as Polanski's "Death and the maiden" deals with the same subject.

A person who was wounded during the war,Jean, has become bitter and desperate.One day,in the boarding-house where he lives,a wounded German takes refuge.At first,against all odds,returning good for evil,he wants to help him;but his pal ,the doctor,tells him he was a torturer.Still, Jean wants to know WHY a man can act like he did: so they give him morphine and a terrifying dialog begins...

Clouzot's lines are hard, dissecting the darkness of the human soul,and finally coming up against the terrible question:why?By far the best of the whole movie, Louis Jouvet's performance will leave you on the edge of your seat .

SEGMENT FOUR The return of René or "the known soldier"

The two final segments are by Jean Dreville who cannot match Clouzot's brilliance,but who makes decent efforts.

René is the 1500th soldier to come home so it's cause for celebration.Best moments come at the beginning;the speech ,by a government representative ,sounds hollow: the man who probably waged war in his office has no idea of the sufferings endured by the humble soldiers;then those present rush to the buffet where they make a clean sweep of wine and biscuits.René finds his wife gone (but do not worry ,the Concierge says,she 's gone with a resistant,not with a collaborator!) and his apartment occupied by a family.But,like the fifth segment ,it will end on a note of hope ,after all ,the 1949 audience was in need of optimism.

SEGMENT FIVE:The return of Louis or "guess who's coming to dine"

Louis is welcomed at the railway station by his mother and the mayor of his village.But he is not alone.He 's got a wife with him and she's German!With hindsight,it seems normal,but if you had been in those people's shoes,you might have thought the same.Louis and his wife become outcasts -Louis's sister's husband was killed during the war- and their life becomes unbearable.

Serge Reggiani shines all along the sketch and ,with the staggering exception of Jouvet's ,gives the finest performance of "Retour à la Vie" .That said,the ending is melodramatic to a fault ,but once again ,it was necessary to conclude on a happy note.

'Retour à la vie' is a very interesting film from many points of view. Made in 1949 it is one of the first films in the history of cinema (maybe the first?) to bring together several segments made by different directors and addressing a common theme. This theme is the return of the French prisoners of war and deportees after many years of captivity during the Second World War, with the personal traumas suffered by each and their effects, but also with how French society knew and could receive them. A few years after the end of the war itself, approaching this theme was an act of courage, because the meeting between those who had returned after years of suffering in which time had seemed to stand still for them and the rest of the French - who had gone through war, occupation and for some also collaboration - was not an easy and necessarily festive one. It is the first fairly frontal approach in many ways to one of the difficult aspects of French history during the Second World War. Discussions of collaborationism and complicity in the Holocaust would come much later, these aspects are not addressed in the film.

The film is divided into 5 independent segments, each depicting the return of a prisoner or deportee. The first segment, directed by André Cayatte, is the one I liked the most. Aunt Emma (Tante Emma) returns after years of imprisonment in Dachau. She is a living skeleton, barely breathing and communicating with difficulty with those around her. The family around her is concerned about the woman's signature on a paper dividing an inheritance. Made with a minimum of cinematic means, the segment brilliantly highlights the contrast between those returned from hell and those left behind, for whom life has continued with its intrigues and pettiness, and gives Bernard Blier the opportunity of making an excellent role as the nephew who succeeds in breaking the wall of silence and communicate with Aunt Emma. The second and fourth segments are placed more in the comic register, probably to balance the gloomy atmosphere of the other stories. Funny in some moments, but less plausible. The most acclaimed role at its time in the film is played (a little too emphatically in my opinion) by Louis Jouvet in the third segment, in which a recently returned ex-prisoner, bearing the physical and mental wounds of captivity, confronts one of the Nazi executioners, now an escaped prisoner, trying to understand the moral decay of the torturers. The dialogue between them seems like a prelude to the 'banality of evil', a concept that Hanna Arendt would describe a decade later. In the final segment, a young Serge Reggiani excels as a prisoner returned home with a German wife who is not accepted in the rural community where he lives. The optimistic note of the ending signals the possibility of reconciliation in Europe that would become a reality in the decades following the war.

The five segments are uneven in artistic level and different in tonality. The best constructed are in my opinion those directed by André Cayatte and Henri-Georges Clouzot. These are also the darkest, confronting more directly the trauma of the prisoners and the chasm between those who returned and those who were waiting (or not) for their return. From a historical perspective but also as a cinematic approach, 'Retour à la vie' is a significant collection, which also says a lot about the war period, but especially about the years that followed.