THE FEAR (LA PEUR). 2015. BASED ON THE 1930 NOVEL BY GABRIEL CHEVALLIER. DIRECTED BY DAMIEN ODOUL. STARRING NINO ROCHER, PIERRE MARTIAL GAILLARD, THEO CHAZAL AND ELLIOT MARGUERON. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
This is a rather unique piece of cinema which I'm glad I had the opportunity to view. In a nutshell, it's basically the story of a young Frenchman's experience of World War One. This was the Great War which kicked off back in 1914 when a young Serbian revolutionary called Gavrilo Princip shot to death Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife Sophie.
You might wonder how we got from that incident I've just described to the French fighting the Germans, or the hated 'Jerries,' in the filthy-dirty, soaking wet trenches. In all honesty, you'd need a history book for that, or Google at the very least! It's a long and complicated story and I'm not sure my schoolgirl history is up to the task of explaining it here. It's a lot easier to tell people how World War Two started. Just tell 'em that Hitler invaded Poland...!
Suffice it to say, anyway, that the war which was supposed to be 'all over by Christmas' of 1914 lasted in fact until 1918 and went a long way towards needlessly wiping out a generation of young men. The carnage was unprecedented and the ferocious battles that took place made words like Verdun, the Somme and Paschendaele into household names.
Many of the soldiers involved didn't really understand why they were stuck in the trenches miles away from their homes and their loved ones, fighting an enemy against whom they held no personal grudges. Theirs was just to 'do or die,' according to the whim of their superiors, and die they did, in their thousands.
While a few veterans of World War Two still remain alive, everyone who fought in the First World War is dead now. The films and books and even TV comedies that have been made about these four years are all sooooo sad. I still can't watch the 'going over the top' episode of classic British comedy BLACKADDER without collapsing in hysterics. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved when Hugh Laurie talks about being the last surviving member of the Tiddlywinks Club...!
The really sad thing about this war- well, one of 'em!- was the way in which so many young men willingly raced to their recruitment offices to sign up. They were so gung-ho about it that it was positively unreal. The hero of THE FEAR is no different. He's terrified in case he'll be declared unfit for service and when he's immediately declared A1, he's as happy as Larry.
Off he rushes to war, afraid, like so many young other men were afraid, that the fighting would all be over before he got there. No such luck. He and his mates might have been a little less gung-ho if they'd known exactly what was in store for them at the 'Front' and just how long they'd be stuck there, losing their extremities to the dreaded 'trench foot' and resorting to eating rats rather than die of starvation.
Our hero's called Gabriel Dufour, by the way, and he's a callow youth of nineteen when we meet him first. He's quite handsome in a heart-throbby kind of way. In fact, he resembles no-one so much as Daniel Radcliffe, the young fella who played Harry Potter in all those, well, HARRY POTTER movies. Female viewers will almost certainly appreciate the sight of Gabriel's tight naked buttocks as he queues with his equally nudie mates for his medical inspection...!
It's clear that Gabriel is just a boy at the start of the film, a naïve boy whose experience of life and its hardships is minimal. After miraculously surviving four long years at the Front, however, the boy is dead, stone-dead. Don't panic, folks, it's all right...! We say goodbye to the boy, certainly, but now the man is born, a man who's seen things no man should ever have to see. That seems to be the universal experience of war, sadly.
Gabriel's story is told as a spoken narrative which he personally directs at the woman he's left behind in his home town. She's his childhood sweetheart Marguerite, a beautiful young woman who has an easy enough job of it in the film. She doesn't speak at all so she clearly didn't have to bother
her pretty little head learning reams and reams of dialogue, haha.
Instead, she's pictured prancing around stark bollock naked with Gabriel in the streams and forests of their home town, in flashback scenes that illustrate perfectly the idyllic and untroubled nature of Gabriel's life before the outbreak of war. Certainly, the memory of Marguerite's soft white bare bosoms seems to afford poor Gabriel some small degree of comfort during his long years at the Front. Why else would he keep thinking about 'em, wink wink...?
The film is quite arty at times. Check out the scene with the butterfly, which reminded me of the end scenes of the movie ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. Based on the book by Erich Maria Remarque, the novel which incidentally was the first one I ever read in college, this is possibly the most famous film ever made about the First World War. It's such a sad film. I kept thinking about it the whole time I was watching THE FEAR.
Check out also the washing line of vermin which utterly turned my stomach, the scene with the abandoned doll and the scene with the dwarf in the wedding dress. Only some of these things are real, by the way, and others caused by hallucinations.
Discover how far some poor men were prepared to go in order to get sent home, away from the war. See a poet, whose fragile and artistic mind was ruined irreparably by the horrors of war, preparing to commit the most revolting act of self-harm to this very end. See a man matter-of-factly taking a chicken for a walk and also a sex-starved nurse exposing her breasts to an injured soldier.
THE FEAR is out on DVD on May 16th 2016, by the way, courtesy of the jolly nice folks from METRODOME who've already brought us cracking films such as MARK OF THE WITCH and Oliver Frampton's terrifying horror debut, THE FORGOTTEN.
In my ever-so-humble opinion, THE FEAR is a more than worthy addition to the collection of movies that have already been made about either the First or Second World Wars. If you like good war films or even just good films, period, you should definitely buy it.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger and movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens' fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra's books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
You can contact Sandra at:
http://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com
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