MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Life’ an Affecting Tale About War’s Aftermath : Film: From Tavernier, an anti-war story that celebrates life and love.

Bertrand Tavernier’s “Life and Nothing But” (Music Hall) is a cause for rejoicing. More than just a beautiful or affecting film, more than one with great performances and a significant subject--all of which it is and has--it’s a movie with breadth of vision and strength of spirit.

This is an anti-war film that doesn’t show a moment of battle or drop of blood. It’s a dirge for the dead that somehow turns into a celebration of life, a social drama that constantly erupts into moments of macabre comedy, a love story with barely a moment of on-screen lovemaking, hardly even a kiss. In many ways, it’s an anachronism: a deeply, almost defiantly old-fashioned movie, which helps reveal our own world through a passionate embrace of one long past.

The story is intimate, but the canvas is epic. The action, spread over several days in the lives of three people, widens to a speaking cast of more than 60. The backdrop--France’s Verdun and Grezancourt immediately following World War I--is so vast that the characters are constantly swallowed up in broad vistas, sweeps of countryside, hills and huge echoing factories, while remaining clear, distinct personalities. It’s a prodigious ensemble recreation. Tavernier, like all first-rate film artists, makes the difficult look effortless.

The movie gives us a microcosm: the passionate encounter between an insouciant society woman and a rough old soldier. And a macrocosm: the turmoil and confusion of France after a war that claimed 350,000 French lives. If that war is over, it’s far from forgotten. Thousands of dead or missing remain unaccounted for and the movie’s protagonist, Major Dellaplane (Philippe Noiret), is in charge of identifying the corpses.

It’s an almost maddening task. Scavengers trail the bereaved. The personal effects of the dead are red-tagged and hawked on tables. Villages try to switch their boundary lines so they can claim more casualties. Mediocre sculptors do land-office business in monuments and commemorative statues.

The corpses are often unidentifiable; even their nationality, French or German, occasionally indeterminate. To make matters worse, live mines still periodically explode and kill. And the French High Command, to Dellaplane’s disgust, have demanded that, within days, he come up with an Unknown Soldier, to be interred with full pomp at the Arc de Triomphe.

It was the search for WWI’s Unknown Soldier that first inspired Tavernier and Jean Cosmos’ screenplay; there really was a Major Dellaplane. Here, the imagined chaos around Noiret--who sometimes gives the impression of being the only officer around who’s actually seen battle--is appallingly funny, appallingly sad, and, sometimes, just plain appalling.

Tavernier’s viewpoint is resolutely unsentimental. Yet it’s not empty of feeling. In the midst of this madness, Dellaplane meets two women, both seeking a missing husband or fiancee, both united by an improbable coincidence: a Parisian industrialist’s daughter-in-law, Irene (Sabine Azema), and a country schoolteacher named Alice (Pascale Vignal). The bitter backdrop accentuates the love story between Dellaplane and Irene: a curious, whiplash romance, whose cadences and currents resemble those of movie romantic comedy.

Some will find this romance too derivative; they’ll be more correct than they’ll know. Tavernier has said that Dellaplane is based partially on John Wayne in John Ford’s cavalry films and Irene on Katharine Hepburn in her screwball comedies for Hawks and Cukor. Yet, this influence doesn’t diminish “Life”; only a hopeless snob would complain. Noiret and Azema, two brilliant actors, deliver performances of terrific emotion, wit and intensity.

Noiret’s priceless hangdog look, his mix of melancholy and affectionate irascibility--the qualities for which audiences loved him as the bearlike projectionist of “Cinema Paradiso”--here seem charged with heroic dignity, weary calm. Opposite him, Azema has lithe reactions, incandescent flirtiness; she’s a firebird veiled in frost. When they argue with each other, it’s electric. When they connect, there’s a melting poignancy.

In Tavernier’s last film, “Beatrice,” he showed a medieval world bounded by brute passion and elemental force. Here, his portrayal of the social chaos of war’s aftermath is devastating. Throughout the early sections, he reinforces the overview by keeping almost constantly in long-shot--by dwarfing the characters and letting cinematographer Bruno de Keyzer bathe everything in a cold, bluish light.

The sometimes harsh, sliding, camera movements, the near-surreal images of nuns on horseback on a bleak strip of beach, the overhead shots of the rat’s maze in which Dellaplane works: all these reinforce the sense of a world and time out of joint. Yet the universe of “Life,” for all its jitteriness and breadth, becomes a coherent one and finally, lovely and heartening as well.

‘LIFE AND NOTHING BUT’

An Orion Classics release. Associate producer Rene Cleitman. Director Bertrand Tavernier. Screenwriter Tavernier and Jean Cosmos. Music Oswald D’Andrea. Camera Bruno de Keyzer. Editor Armand Psenny. Sets Guy-Claude Francois. Costumes Jacqueline Moreau. Executive producers Frederic Bourbolon, Albert Prevost. With Philippe Noiret, Sabine Azema, Pascale Vignal, Maurice Barrier, Francois Perrot, Michel Duchaussoy.

Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG (parental guidance suggested; some material may not be suitable for children).