083 - The Silence of the Sea (Le Silence de la Mer), 1949, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.

Friday, March 24, 2017

083 - The Silence of the Sea (Le Silence de la Mer), 1949, France. Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville.

The United States Constitution contains the Bill of Rights, which comprises the first ten Amendments.

Amendment III states that no soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in manner to be prescribed by law.

James Madison, its author, may have had in mind the Quartering Act of 1765.  It was passed by the British Parliament, when the United States were still British colonies, and stated that the local colonies were to provide British soldiers with accommodations, or quarters, and that the colonists were to provide British soldiers with food.

The Quartering of Soldiers.

Some of us cannot comprehend such a thing.  We have never been placed in a position where we have had soldiers--foreign soldiers!--live in our homes.  We are blessed.

France has been in such a situation.

In 1942, during the German occupation of France, a writer named Jean Bruller published an underground novel under the pen name Vercours.  The events take place in 1941, and feature the quartering of a German soldier in the home of an Uncle and his Niece.

In 1949, Jean-Pierre Melville would release it as a film, his first film, and launch his career as one of France's great movie directors.

Imagine a soldier fighting for your country's enemy living in your house.

For months.

It is a difficult and tedious situation.  For the Uncle and Niece, it is like a prison.

Yet if one must endure such a situation, one could not find a more delightful and considerate guest than the one who billets in this film.

Our soldier, Werner Von Ebrennac, is a delightful man, educated and idealistic.  He is a composer in real life, a lover of culture, warm-hearted and magnanimous.

He spends evenings in the living room of the Uncle and the Niece, delivering monologues of cultural desire while warming himself by the fire.

We are watching the film 70 years after the War is over while sitting on the other side of the world, safely in our own homes.

Von Ebrennac's musings are infectious and inspiring.  We want to get caught up in them.  Not in his vision of marrying Germany and France through war, but his appreciation for French culture.  His love of language and the arts.  His desire for beauty.

The film begins with a voice-over by the Uncle.  He explains the arrival first of German soldiers to his home and how he and his Niece handle it.  Then comes the one soldier who ends up staying.

The Uncle sits in his chair by the fire and drinks his coffee and smokes his pipe, while the Niece sits in the opposing chair and sews.

Someone knocks on the door.  The Niece answers it.

A handsome man enters, politely bows, introduces himself--my name is Werner Von Ebrennac--and apologizes.

He will be living with them.

They sit in silence.

We, through the camera, look down at them.  We look up at him.

We will spend the film looking through different angles, Dutch angles, even from the point of view of inside the fireplace, looking up and out through the flames.

Symbolizing the power differential in the room.

Yet he shows deference.  "I have great respect for those that love their country."

He wants to go to his room but he does not know the way.

The Niece shows him the way.

Von Ebrennac is polite, courteous, social, and engaged.  He seems prepared to be a good guest.

The Uncle and Niece do their best to ignore him.  They behave in their own way as members of the Resistance.

They resist through silence.

The Uncle tells us in voiceover:

"By unspoken agreement, my niece and I decided to change nothing in our lives, not the slightest detail, as if the officer didn't exist.  As if he were a ghost."

The officer will get used to the silent treatment.  He will do all of the talking for them.

When he returns to the house from his duties one day, he enters through the back door so that they will not see his damp and dirty uniform.  He changes clothes before appearing in the living room to warm himself by the fire.  He wants to look his best for them.

He compliments French winters, French forests, French literature.

"I've always loved France."

He talks of his father, a great patriot, who believed in the Weimar Republic, and of Briand, who would have united the countries but who was defeated.

He calls himself a musician, not a performer but a composer, and how strange now to see himself as a soldier.  Yet he believes in the War, believes in it because he does not understand it, does not understand what Hitler is doing.  He believes France and Germany will be united.

He looks at the books on the Uncle's shelf.

Balzac, Baudelaire, Corneille, Descartes, Fenelon, Gautier, Hugo, Moliere, Racine, Rabelais, Pascal, Stendhal, Voltaire, Montaigne.

(Funny that he cites Montaigne out of order.)

Later he will mention Peguy, Proust, and Bergson.

He stands with his arm caressing a large globe.  I keep waiting for him to fall forward as Inspector Clousseau does in The Pink Panther.

After listing so many great writers from France, he can list only one from other countries.

For England, Shakespeare.

For Italy, Dante.

For Spain, Cervantes.

For Germany, Goethe.

But for France, who comes to mind?  There are so many.

"Names jostle like crowds outside a theater, each trying to enter first."

What a great point!  Standing in his double-breasted wool suit, now by the organ, he seems so pleasant.

He draws us in.

Like sitting on a comfy couch by the fire with one's favorite professor discussing great ideas.  Nursing wine and eating sweetbreads.

A book club.  A salon.

He continues.

France dominates literature because it has so many great authors.

But for music, it is Germany.

Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Wagner, Mozart.

He longs for something grand and beautiful to happen.  This will be the last war.  We will never fight again.  We will marry.

Good luck with that, sir.

One day the Niece walks her dog down the road in the snow.  She passes the soldier, Von Ebrennac.  He is dressed in uniform.  He looks at her formally, officially.  He salutes her respectfully, bending forward slightly, tilting courteously.  He never says a word.

He never mentions it back at the house.  He never mentions it at all.

One night the soldier tells the story of Beauty and the Beast.

Fairy tales come from different countries.  Charles Perrault was French.  Hans Christian Anderson was Danish.

But a great many fairy tales are German.  From the Black Forest.  The Brothers Grimm.

Yet Von Ebrennac chooses Beauty and the Beast.  Beauty and the Beast is French.  Written by a Frenchwoman.  Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve.

He seeks to honor his French hosts.

He compares his hosts, the Uncle and the Niece, to Beauty.  Beauty is refined, delicate, cultured, genteel.

He compares himself to the Beast.  The Beast is boorish, awkward, clumsy, a brute.  But inside, the Beast longs for elevation, aspires to greatness, wishes that Beauty would love him.

If he could just get Beauty to see his soul, she would see what a great soul he is.

One night the soldier praises Chartres Cathedral.

And our director, Jean-Pierre Melville, whip pans the camera from the soldier's face, across the room, to an exterior long shot of Chartres Cathedral.  In the distance through the tall grass.

Then he pans again and tilts up to a muzzle.  And slowly moves down the barrel.  Past the mantlet.  To the turret of a tank.  A German soldier stands in the open hatch.  He looks through his field glasses.  He fires.  Fires upon Chartres Cathedral.

Dispelling our drunken dream.

Juxtaposing our soldier's innocent vision with the reality of the war.

No, we are not having a salon.  We are not on a comfy couch listening to our favorite professor.  Nursing wine and eating sweetbreads.  People are dying.

One day the soldier announces to the Uncle and the Niece that he will be visiting Paris.  Earlier he listed the great European countries he has visited.  Paris was not in the list.  This will be his first time.  He has waited a long time.  He is happy.

The soldier imagines himself seeing the great culture of Paris.

Instead, we see him visiting the monuments--the Arch of Triumph, the statue of Joan of Arc--reading the inscriptions, discovering that Paris's culture celebrates her freedom.  That the monuments tell the story of her resistance to interlopers, her defiance of tyranny, her instructions to intruders to get out.

It begins to dawn on him.

When the soldier returns, he returns quietly and stays in the house for nearly a week before showing himself to his hosts.  They do not even hear him.  They simply sense his presence.

One day the Uncle will go into town, and he will have his own encounter with the soldier, in uniform, at work.  The soldier comes out of an office, speaks to a worker, catches a glimpse of the Uncle in a mirror.  He stares at him, caught off guard, hesitating, unsure.  The moment is awkward.  He nods.  He quietly returns to the office and closes the door.

The Uncle says nothing about it, but the Niece knows it happened.  "Women's instincts are sharper than a tiger's."  Somehow this bothers her and she asks permission to retire to bed early.  "And her beautiful gray eyes seemed heavy with reproach and full of sadness."

Werner Von Ebrennac will be completely disabused of his notions, of his idealism, of his Romantic dream.

One day at the office his superior officer will discuss the efficiency of gas chambers.  Currently they are able to execute only 500 people per day.  With improved design they will be able to execute 2,000 people per day.  It all comes down to good engineering.

Von Ebrennac will have an argument with his fellow officers.

They are here to destroy France and not to marry her.  To crush her spirit.  To remove her culture.  To wipe out the memory of her forever.

He is devastated.

For the first time since the first time he enters the living room in uniform.  He tells the Uncle and the Niece to forget everything he has said.  It is all gone.  Gone forever.

He has requested to be sent to the front, to hell.  He is disillusioned and given up.

The Niece speaks for the first time.  "Farewell."

The Uncle tells us in voiceover that Von Ebrennac saw what was underneath her word.

They have grown, if not to love him, at least to admire him.  They will miss him.

When leaving his room, he picks up a book and sees this sentence.

"It is a noble thing for a soldier to disobey a criminal order."

We do not know what happens to him, if he goes to the front or what he does there.  Perhaps he will carry this idea with him.

Jean-Pierre Melville himself was Jewish.  And he fought for the French resistance.  And suffered for it.

This film was personal for him.