Old Wine, New Bottles

Days of Glory and The Lives of Others refit familiar genres to tell unfamiliar stories.

by Sam Adams

If it weren't for the identity of their central characters, it's doubtful that either Days of Glory or The Lives of Others would have attracted much attention, let alone a nomination for the foreign language Oscar. Well-made but unremarkable, their primary goal is not to distract from their subject matter. Days of Glory, directed and co-written by Rachid Bouchareb, looks and feels like a cookie-cutter World War II movie, except that instead of shadowing the standard bunch of ragtag GIs, its fighting men are North African Arabs and Berbers, a group whose contribution to the French war effort has been overlooked or minimized for the last half-century. Likewise, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others could be any well-acted, modestly shot totalitarian thriller were it not for the fact that one of its heroes is a member of the Stasi, the East German secret police.

UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Jamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem and Samy Naceri in Days of Glory. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

It's open to question, I think, how much an unusual subject matter redeems or enhances each of these films. (Less ambiguous is the effect their conservative aesthetics had on the Motion Picture Academy's nominating committee, which knocked out Paul Verhoeven's provocative Black Book in the final round.) By most standards, Days of Glory is the more derivative film, and yet it's somehow more moving, since its very traditionalism makes its substitutions stand out more starkly. Bouchareb and his co-screenwriter, Olivier Lorelle, want to claim the territory right at the heart of popular culture, taking characters who have rarely, if ever, appeared before and dropping them smack into the middle of a rousing war epic. Imagine an Audie Murphy movie with Paul Robeson in the lead.

Bouchareb's band of brothers is cut from broad cloth: There's the towering Messaoud (Roschdy Zem), a muscled womanizer with the heart of a romantic; the shifty-eyed brothers Yassir (Samy Naceri) and Abdelkader (Sami Bouajila), who begin as battlefield scavengers and gradually develop a bond with their fellow soldiers; and scrappy, stout-hearted Saïd, played by the popular French comedian Jamel Debbouze, best known here as the stuttering grocery clerk in Amélie.

Like Debbouze, Naceri is a major star in France, a veteran of Luc Besson's Taxi franchise, which helps explain why Days of Glory feels more like the French equivalent of Saving Private Ryan than a wholesale attempt to rethink the terms of the war movie. By any standard, the movie has served its purpose at home, prompting President Jacques Chirac to bring the pensions of World War II veterans from former colonies up to par with those of French soldiers. But in a way, the film's most effective qualities look backward, not forward. It's hard to imagine a modern-day war movie, even one set in the past, so infused with a sense of nobility and unadulterated, if tragic and unremarked, heroism. Days of Glory isn't just set in the 1940s; it feels as if it could have been made then. (Note: Days of Glory's release date has been moved to March 2.)

By contrast, The Lives of Others is utterly of its current moment, the latest in a line of German thrillers addressing the less savory parts of the country's history. Like the Fuhrerbunker-set Downfall, Lives begins with the end already nigh. It's East Germany, 1984 (ahem), and in five short years the wall will come crashing down. But as an opening title informs us, for the moment, "glasnost is nowhere in sight."

In essence, the movie splits its perspective between Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), a faithful socialist playwright, and Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), the Stasi officer assigned to spy on him. This is purportedly due to rumors of his departure from the party line, but it's really because his superior officer has taken a liking to Dreyman's actress girlfriend (Martina Gedeck). Perhaps the movie's most surprising aspect is how faithfully, even unthinkingly, it adapts to Wiesler's perspective when the story is following him. When Wiesler and his men rush to bug Dreyman's apartment before he returns home, von Donnersmarck stages the scene as a suspenseful set piece — never mind that we ought to be rooting for Wiesler to get caught.

Von Donnersmarck, whose parents are East German, wants to engage our sympathies on both sides, to make us feel that Wiesler, who is introduced teaching a classroom of Stasi cadets the best way to break down an interrogation subject, is as much a victim of totalitarian fear as Dreyman, and that both men are good souls compromised by an unfeeling system. But the movie's humanism feels more evasive than generous, an attempt to skirt issues of culpability by arguing that, in effect, Wiesler is simply doing what he has to do. In the wake of the movie's domestic success, the German press has spent months trying to dig up a real-life analogue to the movie's sympathetic Stasi man, without success, indicating that von Donnersmarck's creation is wishful thinking at best, totalitarian apology at worst. That's not revisionist history: It's fantasy.

(sam@citypaper.net)

Days of Glory

Directed by Rachid Bouchareb

A Weinstein Company release

Opens March 2 at Ritz theaters

The Lives of Others

Written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

A Sony Classics release

Opens Friday at Ritz Five