"The Long Engagement"
(I saw a lot of articles commemorating French actor Gaspard Ulliel, but I didn't even read his works. So I took the time to watch "The Long Engagement" on the weekend, although the most wanted to read is "Young Hannibal" .)
The background of the story takes place during the First World War. The opening chapter is the front line of the Somme, known as the human flesh grinder. The rainy sky, the boundless barbed wire, the statue of Jesus on the cross was beaten to pieces, and the soldiers stepped on the deep and shallow water in the long and narrow trench. Escorting 5 soldiers sentenced to death. . .
The five soldiers wanted to leave the front line by self-mutilation, but the court-martial had no choice but to defect. On one side of the camera are all kinds of lifeless scenes in the trenches, and on the other hand, they explain where the executed soldiers came from, what occupation they had before the war, the geometry of their social relations, their personality, and why they self-harmed, laying a foreshadowing for the search for people after the war.
The joys and sorrows of individuals often seem insignificant in the grand background, and people with different personalities will evolve into cold figures, like the Unsullied in "Game of Thrones", although they have faces, they are just tools for conquest. Through the situation of the five soldiers, the film highlights that war weariness has spread throughout the battlefield, including the German army opposite the French army. Everyone tacitly maintains a state of truce and maintains a fragile balance.
Tranquility was meant to be broken, and five soldiers were sentenced to be thrown into the no-man's-land where the two sides were fighting. The German army's behavior of throwing people into the buffer zone is regarded as a test of the French army for war, and the danger can be imagined. Knowing that his comrades are about to see God, the soldiers get food and clothing, and the male protagonist will not be 20 years old in 5 months. He is taken care of by everyone, and distant lovers can only meet in another space.
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