Claude Berri seldom lets you down whether as Producer, Writer, Actor or Director and if he has a signature when Directing it is in the beautiful compositions he delights in even if dealing with a serious subject as he is here. Although he is no slouch as a writer of Original Screenplays himself some of his finest works have been adaptations of existing material such as Marcel Pagnol's Jean de Florette, Emile Zola's Germinal and this work, based on the novel by Marcel Ayme. It is now a good sixty years since the end of World War II but it remains a sensitive issue to the French for the simple and obvious reason that for several years (1940 - 1944) they were an Occupied nation and that brought out the very Best (Resistance) and very Worst (Collaboration) in the population. Berri's masterstroke is to set his film in the immediate aftermath of the war in a small town still strewn with the rubble of bombing, a backdrop against which the citizens are attempting to resume their lives but in doing so they merely applied a bandage but no dressing to the raw wounds of guilt and retribution allowing them to continue to fester beneath the surface and occasionally erupt into violence and as always it is the essentially gentle giant (Gerard Depardieu), a poetry loving saloon keeper, who pays the highest price. The acting is of the very highest standing throughout with Depardieu, Michel Blanc, Philippe Noiret and Fabrice Luchini beyond praise, as is the film itself if anyone asks you.
Review of Uranus
