To analyse. It was thought to have been definitively cooled, passed into the historical realm, the object of henceforth dispassionate studies and debates. Like those bombs buried in European soil that are still being defused, eighty years after they were dropped, or that continue to explode from time to time, it would seem, however, that the Second World War – in its singular abjection – is returning to the big screens, where in the space of a few months there are no less than ten films relating to the subject.
It has been a long time since such a phenomenon has been observed. We could already be surprised twelve years ago, when coming out on the screens Inglourious Basterds, by Quentin Tarantino, Vincere, by Marco Bellocchio, Shutter island, by Martin Scorsese, The Crime Army, by Robert Guédiguian, Freedom, Tony Gatlif, and more.
Baroque revenge on the atrocity of reality
Today is about Where is Anne Frank!, by Ari Folman (December 8, 2021), by The German Lesson, by Christian Schwochow (January 12), Farewell Mr. Haffmann, by Fred Cavayé (January 12), The Persian Lessons, by Vadim Perelman (January 19), Paragraph 175, by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (January 19), A young girl who is well, by Sandrine Kiberlain (January 26), Simone, the trip of the century, by Olivier Dahan (scheduled for February 23, it has been postponed to October), The Last Testimony, by Luke Holland (March 23), Cunning, by John Madden (April 27), The Collini Affair, by Marko Kreuzpaintner (April 27).
The corpus is eclectic: documentary, fiction, biopic, film on the Jewish genocide, war film, trial film. Two reasons, which already prevailed twelve years ago, remain. On the one hand, the disappearance of witnesses, that explains a documentary like The Last Testimony, whose author has collected for ten years, the word of the executioners, without many surprises in the key, it must be admitted; but also the biopic directed by Olivier Dahan, Simone, the trip of the century, in which Elsa Zylberstein will reincarnate this living figure of memory and this moral guarantor that was in France Simone Veil, who died in 2017.
The return to the tale does not authorize everything
On the other hand, on the aesthetic level, we are witnessing a sort of baroque revenge taken by art on the petrifying atrocity of reality, reinventing it by virtue of the very historicization of the event. However, among the majority of films that we have seen, none can boast of the transfiguring power specific to a Scorsese, a Tarantino or a Bellocchio. This conveniently brings to mind what can be problematic in an artistic license too complacently applied to such a sensitive reality. The Persian Lessons – a German-Russian film that creates a synthetic reality that no longer has anything to do with historical reality – is a good example.
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