The opinion of the “World -” not to be missed “
Another war film bursting with shells and endless fighting? No, you are not. Aurélien Vernhes-Lermusiaux is a delicate filmmaker: born in 1980, in Figeac (Lot), already author of six short films, he has been inhabited by ghosts since his childhood spent in the southwest of France. He is part of this generation who revisits the period film without falling into the bondage of reconstruction vampirizing the project – we also think of Clément Schneider, author ofA violent desire for happiness (2018), filming the Revolution of 1789 as a distant rumor.
Towards the battle will “seek” the time, the end of the XIXe century, to draw from it a completely modern history, inhabited by the twilight blues of Stuart Staples, leader of the British group Tindersticks. A photographer, Louis (Malik Zidi), manages to get himself sent to Mexico by a general of the French army (Thomas Chabrol), in order to take pictures of a bloody conflict – an allusion to the colonial war waged by France in Mexico, from 1862 to 1867, in order to counterbalance the power of the United States.
But Louis despairs of finding the regiment and gets lost in the damp splendor of nature, which the filmmaker films in sequence, as close as possible to the slow movements of this melancholy man. The cumbersome photographic equipment (camera, tripod, etc.) was decidedly not suited to the rapidity of the attacks. How to grasp reality, what does an image tell? Without speech, Towards the battle recalls that manipulation and “fake news” are an old story. At that time, war photographers were sometimes required to move the bodies, or even to exchange the clothes of the combatants, to compose their “frame” and bring back their trophy images.
History of the dead
Louis is not one of them. A dazzling scene in the film shows another photographer at work, a director (or wizard) capturing a field of soldiers “dead” in combat, who get up immediately after the shooting, on a whistle. The voiceover also says that Louis has a wife and a fallen son, Lazare, whom he remembers during nocturnal hallucinations. Towards the battle is a contemporary work, in the plastic and political sense.
The photographer is not long in meeting another man, Pinto, a Mexican survivor of the atrocities (played by Leynar Gomez, actor of the series Narcos). If the film works on the subject of the unlikely friendship between two men, as in Dead man (1995), by Jim Jarmusch, where the Indian (Gary Farmer) takes under his wing the American William Blake (Johnny Depp), it is perhaps because another story of the dead is playing out here again.
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