La Rafle (The Round-up)

Cecil says: The film is set in wartime France and deals with the fate of the Parisian Jewish community. It tells the story of the 'Vel d'hiver', the indoor cycling arena where 13,000 Jews were rounded up pending their transportation elsewhere. It's France's equivalent of the Chile football stadium in 1973, but not really talked about much and I only know of it because I studied contemporary French history.

The fact that I saw it with 40 others on a midweek evening in its 7th week of screening shows how popular the film is in France. That may be linked to the fact that Strasbourg (where I saw the film) has the 2nd biggest Jewish community in France; it may say something about the lack of French films that do really go into the nastier side of French 'collaboration' during the war. It may just be linked to the incredible popularity of cinema in France in general (I can think of no film that would run in Leeds - a comparable city in the UK - for 7 weeks and still get an audience of 40 on a midweek evening).

It's by no means a great film, however. There's a little too much of the Hollywood style, which surprised me in a French director: a bit too much at the beginning showing us how nice these families were, just normal, every day people leading their normal every day lives, setting the scene for when the Round-up happened (but this intro felt too like Apollo 13 where we spend half an hour getting to know the mundane, but normal lives of the American astronauts, before the "Houston problem" moment)...

We watch developments through the eyes of a young Red Cross nurse, free to come and go, but sent in to help the Jewish doctor who is also interned but is treating the sick among the 13,000. She stays with them as long as she can, from the Velodrome to their camps outside Paris and only loses touch when they are finally transported off to some other camp.

It's a shame Bea couldn't join me to see this film because she may have had different insights through the eyes of the Red Cross girl that were perhaps lost on me. It certainly felt strange not to have Bea around to swap thoughts with (and it makes for an unbalanced blog entry too, sadly).

There was a little bit too much focus on the cute little boys who were part of the two families we watch as the film starts. There's no plot twist as in Sophie's Choice; they are all separated from their parents, but somehow the dramatic moment didn't have the impact it was probably meant to have, and I felt the mournful hand waving just reminded me of Les 400 coups and felt cliched.

The only character I could relate to was the Trotskyist father, who feels responsible for his family but desperate that he can do nothing to save them.

There were some nice touches, like the kids who are too young to know their family name: "What was your father called?" "Papa"...And the heroic firemen who came in to turn on the taps in the Velodrome after they had been left for days without water.

But right at the end, as the credits rolled, and we read that "only 6 adults out of the 13,000 rounded up survived the war", I couldn't help thinking: surely that would have been a more interesting film: to show how these guys got through it, rather than doing some sentimental picture based on the fate of the nice little kids...

**.5

Bea says:
As Cecil said, I couldn't join him for this one, as he was in France alone until I joined him at the weekend. When he told me about it though, I was reminded that during the week I had been watching some TV one evening and had caught a repeat of Ray Mears' programme on Extreme Survival. I quite like this series, as I like to imagine how I would cope in a survival situation (not very well, probably).

This episode was set in Poland, and had been about a group of Jewish people who had escaped the ghettos in the nearby towns and had survived the war by living in the forest, using survival skills. By the end of the war, the group was over 1000 strong, and contained men, women and children. They had even taken on the Nazi troops locally, guerilla-style. What made Mears' programme so interesting was that not only did he explore the survival skills used (e.g. the first thing newcomers were taught was how to make a fire without matches or flint), but he included interviews with two remaining survivers about their experiences. It was fascinating.

I have been to the velodrome Cecil talks about - we once went to a cinema near there whilst in Paris and had lunch in a bistro opposite. Although seemingly a pleasant suburb, and there were lots of people in the bistro heading off to a sporting event at the velodrome, there was a sinister air about the place - which I felt before Cecil told me its history. Places remember, even if people don't want to.

Dear John

Bea says: Cecil and I toddled off to our local cinema to see this one - and it was a pretty forgettable experience. The film is taken from a fairly well-known book by Nicholas Sparkes, and the plot is relatively predictable: boy (wrong side of the tracks, serving in Iraq) meets girl (well off, at university) on spring break in their hometown. Whirlwind two week romance follows; he returns to Iraq planning to leave the army at the end of his tour, she goes back to college.

September 11 happens. He stays in army out of a sense of duty to his country, she marries someone else, sending him a "Dear John" letter. Fast forward several years. They meet again, instigated by him when he drives to her family's ranch on the evening following his father's funeral; and they spend an evening talking and rediscovering each other (not sexually), and at the end of the evening they part again - water under the bridge and all that.

I fully expected this to be the film's ending. Then a very weird final scene which seemed like it didn't belong at all - her in a cafe in what was possibly Paris and him locking up his bicycle outside to come in and meet her. Not sure what this was all about - perhaps the test audiences didn't like the non traditional ending so they slipped in an extra scene?? It didn't seem to fit at all well, and I would be interested to know if the book finishes that way.

This might have been a good film had there been any sense of connection or chemistry between the two main characters, but the supposed depth of their relationship was not really very believable. It also might have been deepened as a film if any of the side stories were followed more fully - the autism storyline which ran through the whole film for example, or some more exploration of how events can change who we are and the course of our lives in many ways. This was really the theme of the film, but it failed to be explored, giving way to a formulaic Hollywood romance instead.
*1/2

Cecil says: I have very little to say about this film. I have rarely felt so little connection with a series of characters. The rich American teenager scene has never been one I could really identify with, so no matter how much of a thinking person Savannah (I mean, honestly!) was, her family's big house with big garden parties and horses in the paddock out back belong to a world that I will never feel in touch with.

As for the Iraq veteran guy, I was equally disconnected, and this to such an extent that even the scenes with him at his dying father's bedside did nothing to move me, even though I went through the same experience less than a year ago.

No, the only guy I could vaguely see myself in was the clumsy idiot at the beginning who knocks his girlfriend's bag off the pier into the sea and then doesn't have the guts to jump in and fetch it (enter our soldier hero...).

You don't have to identify with characters to get involved in a movie. But if there is no connection, then the film has to be good to draw you in. And "Dear John" was simply not good enough...

*.5