The Sorrow and the Pity Movie Review

Sunday, 26 March 2006

By Timothy Chow  I just finished Le Chagrin et la Pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity), an epic documentary...if one could actually label documentaries as epic. Clocking in at over 4 hours and widely hailed as possibly the best documentary ever made (check IMDB's top documentaries; guess who's #1?), the 1969 doc tells the tale of France under the Nazi occupation during the Second World War. I hadn't really been brimming with excitement to watch it (and this was before I learned that it was 4 hours long), but I felt compelled as a movie-lover that I should at least see most of the classics of film history; this happened to be one of them, so whatever, right? Yeah. It turns out there's a reason why this documentary's received such critical acclaim during the last 40 or so years. Even through the decades, the potency of its message has managed to remain, showing the crushing reality of life under foreign occupation through interviews as well as archival film footage. Like a documentary should, it covers more than just one side of the story, and director Marcel Ophüls explores with great detail the psyche and reasoning of everyone even remotely involved in the occupation: the Germans, French and English; the Communists, Nationalists, Fascists; the bourgeois; the poor, Jews, homosexuals, spies, French politicians, English politicians, soldiers, etc. These discussions are invaluable, and they expose some of the logic behind the rifts and divisions even within each “side:” the French collaborators who worked with the Germans against their own people, the French underground resistance who did everything to thwart their plans, not to mention all the people caught in between. It's amusing yet terrible to see each side give their rendition of events - the Resistance fighters who would insist on one telling of the story, compared later to the sanitized version that a German soldier gives. Through it all, one begins to develop an understanding that everything REALLY is in shades of gray, kind of like in Crash where every character does a flip at the end. It's the same here, though done not so outright-manipulatively and minus the Canadian connection, but where you begin with a certain understanding of some ideological viewpoint, the consequences of that, and the willingness of people to achieve that end. The lengths these people go to is certainly unexpected at times. What's extremely impressive, however, is the way that Ophüls manages to hide his own viewpoint the entire time. Whereas one expects a German filmmaker to at least offer excuses for the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime, the documentary is certainly a lot more neutral; he obfuscates his opinions behind the words of his interviewees, letting them do the opinionating, letting them talk even when he may or may not disagree with them, and through editing, allowing the viewers themselves to form their own opinions even if they're completely contrary to what was just said on film. It's no easy feat, and one shouldn't confuse this with having no opinion at all or completely misrepresenting what the person being filmed just said (a la Michael Moore), but it's the way that Ophüls tells the story that things get revealed in a subtle manner. Certainly, it's no easy feat for the viewer, either (not even considering its length and the fact that you're watching 60 year old news reels, nor to mention that the entire thing is in black and white), but the more you put into the experience, the more you get back as you peel off the layers of words and deceit. A remarkable achievement in filmmaking, and eye-opening in subject matter. 4 ½ out of 5 stars

 

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