CAPITAINE CONAN (75)

Directed by: Bertrand Tavernier

Starring: Philippe Torreton, Samuel Lebihan, Bernard le Coq

The Pitch: At the end of WWI, an elite commando unit - led by the daring Captain Conan - finds it hard to channel wartime aggression into civilian pursuits.

Theo Sez: An ace away from Film of the Year status - that ace being the eponymous Conan, a ferociously powerful figure unaccountably marginalised in the film's second hour, replaced by underdeveloped courtroom scenes and the comparatively dull moral dilemmas of a bookish hero. Both its setting and its loping, leisurely pace make it a companion-piece to LIFE AND NOTHING BUT, but it has a greater and more terrifying theme to add to that movie's elegaic madness-of-War message - viz., that the anti-social belligerence of what civilians call psychos and criminals can also make for brilliant, truly inspirational soldiers : it's all about that single moment near the end, when Conan looks up from an enemy corpse with blood in his eye - back in battle at last, able to find greatness in aggression. The sprawling narrative that precedes it is thus appropriate, like the build-up to the cathartic climax of UNFORGIVEN - all the messiness and equivocations of civilian life, blown away by the glorious certitude of War ; but, again, we don't see the mess as it affects Conan - he just disappears. Fortunately, a lot of what we do see remains memorable : superb, wide-angle battle scenes and a richly-detailed evocation of a world still reeling from years of war, yet to recover its moral bearings (an indirect comment on Europe's current Balkan war-zone, the former Yugoslavia?), all spiced with the lampooning of things military that's been a Tavernier favourite since Colonel Tramichel ("Tra comme tralala") in COUP DE TORCHON. It's a grand, epic entertainment - and probably more than that : I left the screening full of quibbles and could've-done-betters then discovered, much to my surprise, that the film had soaked through right to my subconscious. I spent the night haunted by dreams of fighting, bayonet in hand, on the stubbly hills of the Bulgarian Front.