LIFE AND NOTHING BUT Movie Review

La Vie et Rien d'Autre

Two women—one aristocratic (Sabine Azéma), one a provincial schoolteacher (Pascale Vignal)—search for their missing men on a bloody French battlefield following World War I. They are helped in this seemingly impossible task by a Major Dellaplanne (Philippe Noiret), whose commitment to accounting for the hundreds of thousands of men missing in action is tempered by his deep cynicism. By the time the film is over, he has reached a very particular kind of peace with his grim, seemingly endless task. Bertrand Tavernier's Life and Nothing But is a large-scale film with an extremely intimate focus; this is necessary to convey the enormity of the task Dellaplanne has before him, as well as to contrast the scale of the war's carnage against the individual faces that it affects. One of those faces belongs to actress Sabine Azéma, who here is a match for the great Noiret. Azéma appeared in a great many films that were not thundering hits in the U.S., but she ought to be more well known. She has an extraordinarily delicate and expressive presence, and this is one of her most extraordinary performances. As for Noiret, one might call Dellaplanne's exhausted nobility the role he was born to play, except that whatever Noiret does seems the role he was born to play. He's extraordinary here. Do what you can to see Life and Nothing But in a well-mastered letterboxed version; Bruno De Keyser's widescreen images are quite stunning. César Award to Philippe Noiret as Best Actor of 1990.

NEXT STOP … The Judge and the Assassin, Coup de Torchon, Paths of Glory

1989 (PG) 135m/C FR Philippe Noiret, Sabine Azema, Francoise Perrot; D: Bertrand Tavernier; W: Bertrand Tavernier; C: Bruno de Keyzer. British Academy Awards '89: Best Foreign Film; Cesar Awards '90: Best Actor (Noiret), Best Score; Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards '90: Best Foreign Film. VHS ORI, FCT