Changes on the Western Front – Weekend – Kommersant
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Another adaptation of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front has been released on Netflix, this time in German. The radical retreat of its authors from the text of the novel only strengthened its pacifist pathos.
Remarque’s anti-war novel, published in Germany in 1929 and soon banned in a number of European countries (including Czechoslovakia!), was almost immediately filmed by Hollywood – the screen version, filmed by Lewis Milestone already in 1930, received two Oscars (case was before the censorship restrictions of the Hayes Code). The next attempt to adapt the novel happened in 1979: the television version of Delbert Mann received the Golden Globe. The current, already German film adaptation is made for streaming – and it has accumulated enough changes in order to talk about the film as a completely autonomous work; comparing a Netflix project with Remarque’s novel is a pointless and even harmful exercise.
The similarities between them are only in the names of the characters and the time of action (it seems that Remarque’s heroes even sat in the trenches not opposite the French, as in the film, but opposite the British). Edward Berger’s optics (in his filmography – episodes of several important series, such as “Your Honor”, “Germany 83” or “Police Phone – 110”), is obviously shaped by previous adaptations to a much greater extent than by the original source itself; it is fundamentally different from the views of the participants and witnesses of that war, familiar to us from the literature. The heroes of the canonical texts about trench hell – Hasek, Selin, the same Remarque – looked at the fields of Verdun and the Eastern Front over a bowl of soup, through endless mud pits, stirred by millions of boots and shoes. Actually, Remarque’s text begins with the assault on the regimental kitchen by soldiers returning from the front line. In the meat grinder, which has become a logical and technological continuation of the industrial assembly line, any detail – from a school that kindles patriotic fervor in the “iron youth” to a bombed-out dugout in which this feeling undergoes significant transformations – is arranged in the image and likeness of the entire system. Each element testifies to the same thing, so that the story of some clever corporal forced to steal pigs from the kitchen discredits the idea of a “bourgeois war” no less than a naturalistic description of a gas attack.
But Berger looks at the First World War just through the scope. Following the general plot of the classic film adaptation of Milestone, which inevitably simplified the monologue of the protagonist Remarque (here he is played by the theater actor Felix Kammerer, who makes his film debut), he mercilessly discards key scenes from the narrative to fill the place with thundering battle scenes. And he even takes the liberty of finishing the finale – before the conclusion of the Compiègne truce in November 1918 (in the film, for some reason, it is presented as a peace treaty), completely making sense of the bitter irony of the novel’s title. No, it’s not quiet and calm on the Netflix front: in every scene, a marketing calculation is clearly visible here, placing the film in a conditional niche of a military action like Dunkirk, only with a simpler concept.
It is noteworthy that with all the abundance of visual and sound effects that create rather strong discomfort for the viewer, The Front never slides into the “meat-packing plant aesthetics” characteristic of Russian military cinema, especially early ones, but does not rise to the level of the chilling psycho-horror of late Soviet cinema. (the best example is “Come and See”).
The main shocker is the dirt on the face of the protagonist. Here it is sprinkled with earth and ashes after shelling, then cherry rivers of blood flow over this coal blackness. In the climactic scene – both of the film and the novel – when Remarque’s hero kills his first Frenchman with a dagger during a counterattack, instead of a face we see a multi-layered, white-and-yellow mask, reminiscent of the terrible make-up of butoh theater actors. As if the creators of this film adaptation were disappointed in the possibilities of the literary word to convey the terrifying truth to the audience and decided to act exclusively by cinematic means, again and again throwing the viewer into the attack on barbed wire, under flamethrowers, under the clanging tracks of outlandish tanks, on a close-up of the dumbfounded faces of young actors, too beautiful for a story about the funnel of a senseless catastrophic war that has opened up in the middle of Europe. The beauty demanded by the very format of modern streaming shines through here in every mise-en-scene, in every second of brutal action, in the silhouette of an armored car rising like a black steel sun over the line of the trench horizon, in a dugout still life with the remnants of a hearty French meal, in majestic landscape interludes, obviously designed to demonstrate the contrast between the innocence of nature and man-made hell (the technique does not work – this hell seems to be part of the same nature). But Bergen still manages to go, albeit swaying, along a thin line and make the viewer watch for two and a half hours how the characters covered with scabs and blood die and kill each other in the middle of a muddy sea.
The achievement as a whole is not great – if only the scriptwriters of the film had not smuggled into the Remarque text an important gag, that same fantasy about the negotiations in the Compiègne forest and the events of the next six hours, before the ceasefire agreements come into force. By staging the actual surrender of Germany, they endow the command of both sides with full responsibility for the current and future bloodshed. The inflexibility of the French Marshal Foch, who dictates the most severe terms of a truce to the vanquished, is almost directly called the seed from which Hitler’s revanchism will grow years later. And the indestructible, hereditary, professional cannibalism of the Kaiser’s military dynasties, who think the world in terms of a chess game, will serve as the ground for it. It is the quiet cabinet scenes with the participation of people in uniform with a lace that are the central chapters of this tragedy – and it is no coincidence that the only star in the Front cast appears in them – Daniel Brühl, almost unrecognizable, however, under a false mustache with a brush. Quiet offices, decorated with gold stucco and velvet, are the very front on which nothing has changed either in those four years or in the next hundred.
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