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Joyeux Noël (2005)
I'll round out 2021 with a short little write-up of this sweet, occasionally funny, and often heartbreaking WWI movie - ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
philomytha, you might want to add this to your WWI watch list, because it's very good! I watched it as part of my Watch All The Daniel Brühl Things project, but it's entirely worth watching for reasons that have nothing to do with Daniel Brühl (though he is excellent in it).
Joyeux Noël is a fictionalized retelling of the Christmas Truce of 1914. The movie follows several different characters representing three different nationalities (Scottish, French, and German). Brühl plays the Jewish-German lieutenant in charge of the German side at this particular section of the war front, and is characteristically adorable. The other primary characters are a Scottish soldier who enlisted to join his brother and then lost him to the war, writing letters home to his mother that pretend they're both still alive; a chaplain who followed his parishioners to the front; a French lieutenant deeply worried about his pregnant wife, who is in the German-occupied part of France; and a pair of separated German lovers, a drafted opera singer and his girlfriend.
The movie is brutally, unrepentantly anti-war, as it should be. It opens and closes with wartime propaganda that the other side is Just Not Like Us, while the central core of the movie is pointing out that the primary thing dividing them is an arbitrary front and their superiors' orders to kill each other. It's not an ideological war; it's a war being fought over political issues that none of these characters have anything to do with. And when that barrier is temporarily removed, they cautiously and then more genuinely get along fine, and even start to forge tentative friendships, until the war comes crashing back down on them.
Totally requesting this for Chocolate Box, because I desperately crave postwar fic that gives them all the happy ending they deserve.
philomytha, you might want to add this to your WWI watch list, because it's very good! I watched it as part of my Watch All The Daniel Brühl Things project, but it's entirely worth watching for reasons that have nothing to do with Daniel Brühl (though he is excellent in it).Joyeux Noël is a fictionalized retelling of the Christmas Truce of 1914. The movie follows several different characters representing three different nationalities (Scottish, French, and German). Brühl plays the Jewish-German lieutenant in charge of the German side at this particular section of the war front, and is characteristically adorable. The other primary characters are a Scottish soldier who enlisted to join his brother and then lost him to the war, writing letters home to his mother that pretend they're both still alive; a chaplain who followed his parishioners to the front; a French lieutenant deeply worried about his pregnant wife, who is in the German-occupied part of France; and a pair of separated German lovers, a drafted opera singer and his girlfriend.
The movie is brutally, unrepentantly anti-war, as it should be. It opens and closes with wartime propaganda that the other side is Just Not Like Us, while the central core of the movie is pointing out that the primary thing dividing them is an arbitrary front and their superiors' orders to kill each other. It's not an ideological war; it's a war being fought over political issues that none of these characters have anything to do with. And when that barrier is temporarily removed, they cautiously and then more genuinely get along fine, and even start to forge tentative friendships, until the war comes crashing back down on them.
Totally requesting this for Chocolate Box, because I desperately crave postwar fic that gives them all the happy ending they deserve.
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Yeah, fine, sold.
Totally requesting this for Chocolate Box, because I desperately crave postwar fic that gives them all the happy ending they deserve.
. . . including getting the hell out of Germany in about twenty years . . .
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ALSO MY THOUGHT.
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Happy New Year!
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In addition to postwar happy endings (and +3000 to "Horstmayer and his wife getting the fuck out of Germany") some part of me also wants a completely unrealistic utopian ending where SOMEHOW they don't get found out and they get to have their New Year's party after all.
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AWWWWWW. Now I want that too! Also, this is a canon where the "canon interrupted by alien invasion" freeform tag would work very nicely. I would love to see them team up against a greater enemy than each other! Think of all the mutual cooperation and h/c possibilities in an alien invasion scenario.
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ETA: Notably, I see how not signing up for Chocolate box is working for you. XDDD
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ETA: Notably, I see how not signing up for Chocolate box is working for you. XDDD
HUSH. NOTHING TO SEE HERE. T___T
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I want to believe that everyone emigrated to America after briefly meeting up in Paris.