April is the cruellest month

Rating: 9/10 (27 January 2020)

Director Sam Mendes controls even the smallest component of this historic recreation of a heroic feat. He keeps the pace fast and full of action. And he confirms, in theory, the feeling that the First World War was nothing more than an abominable futility caused at first by a fight between cousins. The Balkans were the cause of the war at the beginning, but Kaiser William II, son of Frederick III of Germany and Victoria, eldest daughter of Queen Victoria of England, was the one who agreed to help the Austro-Hungarian Empire wage war on Russia. It was the Kaiser who encouraged German nationalism and warlike vocation; who built the German armies and navy.
T.S. Eliot started his most famous poem, "The Waste Land", with the verse ¨April is the cruellest month¨. Why is April cruel? because it leaves us full of hope and the desire for spring to come soon. Yet... spring lingers with time! In war, we hope that peace will come soon, and yet it lingers with horrors. April in any temperate climate gets tired of the winter and the cold. It wants the light and the heat back. April offers only a few beautiful and pleasantly sunny days; ain't April a provocation, full of rain, mud, cold and false promises?
In ¨1917,¨ which takes place on April 6 and 7 of that year, Colonel MacKenzie's final sentence (Benedict Cumberbatch) - ¨I hoped today would be a good day. Hope is a dangerous thing¨ - confirms that April is synonymous with false hope. Pessimism wins.
The German withdrawal from the Hindenburg Line - their defensive position built on the Western Front (France) in 1916 in an attempt to curb Anglo-French attack power - is taking place. Mendes' film tells the emotional & exhausting crossing by two English soldiers of the enemy lines. Brightly shot in the sequential-shot (long-take) technique, it takes the viewer into the trenches, out of the trenches (¨no man's land¨) and thus enhances realism. Although, technically speaking, the film has more than exactly one shot, the ingenious skill of the extraordinary, 14 times Oscar-nominated cinematographer Roger Deakins manages to mislead the viewer.
There are no slow parts and the journey is electrified from the first minute. Dialogues are, of course, an essential component for the long-take style to work. There are no redundant dialogues and '1917' gives the false impression of being shot in a single scene. A huge technical achievement at a remarkable rhythm. Despite its extraordinary audacity, however, the screenplay gloats in some places. Being the case of a realistic film, one can't help demanding... realism! I'll just give one example: a rat casually blasts a tunnel, and the people inside it would be literally without salvation; the explosion was powerful enough to collapse the entire tunnel, yet they survive. In any case, from now on, whenever avant-garde cinematography and camera handling are discussed, 1917 will be part of the discussion, together with Hitchcock's ¨Rope,¨ Sokurov's ¨The Russian Ark¨, and a few Oriental filmmakers.