A Hopeless Verneuil

 Another text from Recrudescence.

A Hopeless Verneuil

What is more formidable than a Romanian farmer? Let's take one from the 1940s. There he is, dancing pleasantly like a Zorba. But he gets cruelly caught by History who won't let go of him for another ten years, after so many twists and turns that they become comical. This good Christian is detained (out of malice) in a camp for Jews from which he escapes only to find himself in Hungary, and then in Nazi Germany before it is liberated by the Americans. We'll recognize the thread of the very famous novel by Virgil Gheorghiu, The Twenty-Fifth Hour. A film was made of it in 1966. Henri Verneuil is the name of the guilty party.

What is more polyglot than a Romanian farmer? When he follows in their escape a few Jews from the labor camp, Johann Moritz (that's his name) ends up in Budapest, where he is quickly arrested by the police. They torture him, and what's beautiful is not that he doesn't talk, it's that he says — in what looks like perfect Hungarian — that he knows nothing. Where did this Romanian farmer learn Hungarian? A mystery. Later, transferred to Germany where a military disciple of Rosenberg sees in him a pure Aryan specimen, he becomes a SS sentinel. What's beautiful is not that his face is on the cover of Signal, it's that he speaks what looks like perfect German. Later still, when the Americans plant their flag on this same camp and he is summoned by a chewing-gum-chomping commanding officer, it's in what looks like perfect English that he defends his now incomprehensible cause. Could our hero have learned both German and English?

One will say that this debate is outdated and that in 1966 the demands of international coproduction imposed on producers this homogenisation of languages. What one won't say is that the French television viewer of 1988 will see the film in a version where all the intertitles — giving the dates and places of the action — are written in English and not subtitled. Moral: it is easier to cross the maelstrom of History than to watch The Twenty-Fifth Hour on television.

Why is this serious? Because there are millions of people in the world who have been caught in the whirlwind of History and were unable to respond to what was being said to them because they didn't speak the language*. Because it was possible to die for a misunderstanding or for a sentence wrongly interpreted. Because the victors always impose their language, and because the Americans, victors in the domain of cinema, imposed theirs on international cinema and its valets** — Verneuil, in this case. Because, as a result, nothing remains of the film's subject, which was supposed to be the absurdity of the human condition, and all that's left is the comedy of the misunderstanding.

There would be many other ways to talk about this grotesque and justly forgotten film. It belongs to a category with devastating effect that one could call "the absurd in twenty lessons." Always in full possession of the necessary and sufficient knowledge to situate oneself in the story (and in History), the spectator watches how a poor soul, a Romanian farmer, who understands nothing about events that are beyond him and that never even manage to leave a mark on him. Result: instead of holding us as witnesses to the criminal absurdity of situations, the film has us follow someone who understands nothing because he's first and foremost an idiot. Anthony Quinn is incidentally perfectly at ease in the role.

Is Verneuil on the side of those who know everything? Perhaps, but also on the side of those who don't feel anything. For when the Hungarians ask the "volunteers for Germany" to decorate their convoy with little flowers picked up in the field, one clearly sees it's a scene of dark humor. What one sees less well is why at that moment the music becomes pastoral, all violins and lyricism. Second degree? One can, quite frankly, doubt it. The Pavlovian hypothesis is unfortunately far more plausible. There comes a moment when a filmmaker, when never giving a damn about his subject, lets himself create these sound slip ups.

The film is twenty-two years old. One hopes there'll never be another one like it — ever. It's too sad. The only (malicious) thing that one ends up thinking about this Twenty-Fifth Hour is that if all Romanian farmers are as stupid as Johann Moritz, one can understand how they found themselves so easily under Ceaușescu's boot. But this is a malicious thought***.

* In his conversations with Ferdinando Camon (published by Gallimard), Primo Levi recalls his experience of the camps: "Few of us, Italian Jews, understood German or Polish, or so little of it. I knew a few German words. Language isolation, in these conditions, was lethal. Nearly all the Italians died for this reason." 

** This point is open to discussion. It's possible to consider "dubbed French" as a language unto itself, twice foreign. It denotes both the strangeness of the French people toward the language of the dominant classes and the strangeness of the French language to American cultural domination. Dubbed French, just Arabic, verlan or slang, is part of the confection of this atonal and almost Bressonian language, that of rap or which is spoken by the young boy in Doillon's Little Gangster. The fight for original versions is therefore not over; it's just forgotten. 

*** The truth is more nuanced. If the events of Winter 1989 revealed a Romanian people very much damaged by History, this people still turned out to be a lot cleverer than Johann Moritz since they learned quickly how to convert their revolution into a telefilm which, at first at least, had a lot of success. 

First published in Libération on December 7th, 1988. Reprinted in Recrudescence, Aléas Editeur, 1991.