A break in the war

Torn between the competing attentions of two soldiers -- one French, one German -- a friendly tabby cat is eventually accused of spying, convicted of treason and executed by the French army. Like the rest of “Joyeux Noel,” the scene was based on real events that transpired in December 1914. Writer and director Christian Carion shot the scene, with blanks, of course, but left it out of the final cut of the film. It upset the extras, and he felt it strained credibility.

Even without the cat execution, the film offers an embarrassment of singular moments, marking the point at which war began tipping inexorably from old-fashioned brute violence into large-scale theater of the absurd and bringing into high-relief the savage absurdity of a close-range war of attrition.

As tense and surreal as any postmodern war satire, it remains unswayed by the Byzantine fog-of-war relativism that characterizes many current (very fine) films on the subject. “Joyeux Noel” bypasses the ironic take -- the reality it depicts is studded with enough ironies as it is (the high-ranking German officer, for instance, is Jewish) and makes a sincere, unembarrassed plea for sanity.

The movie begins with a trope-y, but effective, sequence of scenes in which French, British and German children dutifully recite xenophobic rhymes in separate classrooms. From there, it rushes to join its adult protagonists -- a French lieutenant named Audebert (Guillaume Canet); Scottish and German officers Gordon (Alex Ferns) and Horstmayer (Daniel Bruhl); and Palmer (Gary Lewis), an Anglican priest with a doggedly populist and humanist take on his job -- in their respective trenches, which are located within surreal proximity of each other on the Western Front.

One of the German soldiers is a famed tenor named Sprink (Benno Furmann). In the days leading up to Christmas, his lover and singing partner Anna Sorensen (Diane Kruger) arranges for him to be granted leave to perform with her for officers on the front. After the recital, Sprink insists on returning to the trenches to sing for his men, and Anna insists on joining him. They arrive on the front as the Scots are beginning their celebration.

The Germans and Anna, who is a Dane (she and Sprink are not the only international couple in the film, nor the most geopolitically crossed), are close enough to hear the bagpipes. As Sprink begins to sing, Palmer begins to accompany him, and soon Sprink is raising a tiny Christmas tree and venturing into no-man’s-land. Nobody fires.

Soon, Scottish, French and German soldiers have declared a truce and come together to listen to music and Mass, share army-issued champagne, chocolate and Christmas trees, and exchange addresses and trench-raid warnings. They call timeout to bury the dead, play a few soccer matches and give each others letters to mail.

This strange rapprochement -- as seemingly natural as it is extraordinary -- is laden with tension; and the movie deftly and subtly limns the precarious line between basic human goodwill and institutionalized hatred. The soldiers, for the most part, are bakers, farmers and shopkeepers -- simple men with more in common with one other than with the commanders consigning them to death; and it sounds cornier than it plays to see the troops brought together in the shared languages of music and Latin Mass.

Given the current miasmic context -- a context that is disturbingly echoed toward the end of the film, when Palmer is sent back to his parish in disgrace, and a martinet bishop delivers a sermon on God’s desire to see all Germans exterminated -- the simplicity of the argument can take on the blurry edges of wishful thinking.

But the war-as-hell argument is anything but a hard sell, and the uncomplicated humanism of “Joyeux Noel,” with its Christmas message of peace, feels at once irrefutable and refreshing.

*

‘Joyeux Noel’

MPAA rating: Rated PG-13 for some war violence and a brief scene of sexuality/nudity

A Sony Pictures Classics release. Writer-director Christian Carion. Producer Christophe Rossignon. Cinematographer Walther van den Ende. Editor Andrea Sedlackova. Production designer Jean-Michel Simonet. Costume designer Alison Forbes-Meyler. In French, English and German with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 56 minutes.