This is an anti-war movie. An anti-war film with French humor and French freehand brushwork. The director uses this freehand brushwork to contrast the cruelty and unreasonableness of war. All kinds of characters in the movie, whether they are senior commanders of the French army, pilots, guards of German concentration camps, German widows who lost their husbands in the war, brothers, are all ordinary people, just like you and me. The cruel and unreasonable war involved them, causing them to suffer and suffer greatly.
Interestingly, in this film, the director made a lot of descriptions of the class contradictions at that time. The senior French officials and the lower-level soldiers who were also prisoners of war had a deep estrangement, but each had a deep friendship and love with the senior officers and widow farmers of the enemy country. The friendship between the senior French official and the senior German official who was in charge of guarding him had a certain kind of strong medieval chivalry. (The director's portrayal is far-sighted, a spirit that didn't exist in World War II.) The forced separation of the French soldier and the German peasant's widow is another of the film's most poignant moments. The war made them meet, and they broke up. Incredible war!
The disadvantage of the movie is that the structure is a bit too loose. The prisoners of war in the French concentration camps in the movie move from the first concentration camp where they are held to another castle where they are held. There is basically no plot foreshadowing. The fate of the French prisoners of war is no longer described, and the supposedly important movie clues about the tunnels dug in the concentration camps have also disappeared. I have to say that this is a great regret of this excellent film.
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