... A MAJORITY OF the
142-minute epic emerges from a rare space of
shame and acceptance. The makers are
inherently conscious of Germany’s starring
role in the grammar of modern warfare. The
insight is palpable, not so much from the
familiar plot – of a young soldier’s
anti-journey from human to statistic in
World War I – as from the steady
deconstruction of our notions of violence.
War here is as soul-crushing as ever, but it
is also the sensory bridge that connects man
and beast. Over the course of the film, the
soldiers are reduced to their most primitive
instincts: survival and hunger. They join
the Imperial German Army as idealistic
recruits out of school, flooded with grand
visions of valour and patriotism. But the
hellish trenches at the Western Front
quickly convert them into glorified animals,
for whom killing is merely an act of
self-preservation and fear.
Their teeth get progressively yellower and
their skin rougher; their soiled uniforms
start to resemble sheets of second-hand fur;
they crawl on all fours through flesh-strewn
and filthy ditches; their screams grow
guttural; even the score sounds like a
three-note growl. In other words, they
become an indistinguishable part of the
wilderness: the lucky ones are buried, the
others are entrenched. The land these
soldiers are instructed to fight for is shot
like the nature of wildlife documentaries –
with a sense of sweeping spectacle – as if
to imply that these are creatures defined
not by war but the food chain. Some of the
starkest moments of the film don’t feature
death but life itself – where ravaged
bodies, perennially on the brink of
starvation, would rather attack an elusive
meal than the lurking enemy.
At one point, the German battalion forces
their way across no man’s land into the
French trenches. In the midst of all the
claustrophobic bloodshed, three Germans
suddenly find themselves in a bunker stocked
with food and drink. Like sharks distracted
by the smells of blood, their primal
impulses take over, they forget about the
killing, and desperately stuff their faces
with the finest of French meat. Only the
roar of approaching tanks gets them
scurrying out like the rats that precede
them. The image might have been funny if not
for how sad it really is.
Ditto for the famished Germans stealing
geese (prompting a phrase that foreshadows
their own fate) from a French farmer – a
track that puts into perspective the
anonymous ironies of war. At another point,
two soldiers fling aside their bowls of soup
to plug a spurting wound of a suicidal
comrade. Seconds later, the soup is being
demolished by a passive onlooker even as
their friend bleeds to death. Their
regression is so absolute that even the act
of flaunting a girl’s undergarments in a
dormitory feels surprisingly tender. The
bloodied soldiers, for a fleeting minute,
morph back into the red-blooded boys they
once were, losing themselves in the scent of
panties and peace.
The soldiers’ struggles are juxtaposed with
closed-door negotiations in a train
carriage. Daniel Bruhl plays real-life
German politician Matthias Erzberger, an
empathetic man tasked with hammering out an
armistice with his French counterparts. He
doesn’t want more German troops to die, but
his urgency is resented by a fascist General
who is orchestrating the chaos from the
comfort of his office. The General is
presumably a sign of things to come, a
Hitler-like figure who might have been one
of the first to burn Remarque’s novel in
Nazi Germany.
The intent behind adding these characters to
the source material, though, isn’t just to
create a ticking-clock suspense: Erzberger
has three days to sign the document and end
the war, while the General urges his army to
fight till the 11th hour. It’s also to
amplify the dehumanisation of the troops
who, unbeknownst to them, are having their
destiny written by a bunch of well-dressed
men who joust with words while casually
munching on croissants in warm rooms.
Most of all, what this cross-cutting does is
elevate the gravitas of the protagonist’s
journey. He is a teenager named Paul (Felix
Kammerer), and everything about this
narrative is designed to swallow him whole.
He soon loses his friends who enrolled with
him; he spends a night weeping next to a
French soldier he’s killed; his mentor Kat
(a phenomenal Albrecht Schuch) fosters that
dangerous thing called hope. Watching Paul
search for dignity is like watching a human
refusing to transform into a werewolf,
clutching onto the remnants of his humanity
with all he’s got.
But the film neither opens, nor closes with
him. It opens with a fox feeding her kits,
followed by the death of a boyish soldier
named Heinrich at the front. (In a startling
montage that evokes the “industry” of war,
Heinrich’s recycled uniform ends up on
Paul). The film closes with another
fresh-faced soldier, who arrives at the
front in the dying moments of the war. In a
way, this boy, the fox and Heinrich
represent different stages of Paul’s
18-month trial in the trenches: human,
beast, nametag. Try as he may to defy it,
the fur will come, the fangs will grow, and
the sun will set.
Yet, the sight of Paul miraculously
withstanding the bullets and artillery fire
that claim his comrades is seldom thrilling.
It’s sad, like a slow-motion tragedy –
because it not only reiterates the
randomness of war but also paves the path to
a future he is not equipped to fathom. He
senses that the grass he’s on is perhaps as
green as it gets. The closer he gets to the
end of the film, the louder the question in
his head becomes: Is living through war the
only way to survive it? Paul is not looking
for a new answer. And in doing so, he finds
a more truthful one.
Available to
stream on
Netflix.
***
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