It's quite a thing, this film about small acts of kindness, and that fraternal spirit in all human beings that lets us recognize each other despite differences in language or skin color... well some of us anyways. It's about the Christmas spirit, and the way all that for one night and one day, we can all stop caring about the problems of this world and care more about each other. For a little while. Maybe because of that, there was an overwhelming feeling of sadness for me watching this film, knowing what had to happen when Christmas was over.
Joyeux Noel is a story inspired by the events in Europe on December 24th, 1914, when all up and down the western front, soldiers of all nationalities came up out of their trenches to share Christmas together. The story some of the survivors told was of singing Silent Night and hearing across no man's land other soldiers singing Silent Night, or Douce Nuit, or Stille Nacht, and realizing they had far more in common than what separated them. They were all young men far from their loved ones, likely to die in the mud without seeing home again, whose individual lives didn't amount to much beyond moving a border a few yards back and forth. So they took a break from killing each other and played football in the snow between the trenches, until it was time to go back. Soldiers exchanged letters for family in occupied territory, showed each other pictures of their children, made plans to see each other again after the war, and wished each other well.
The film focuses on the subversive effect of that kind of contact between people, when all these soldiers gathered together singing Christian songs, in need of both physical and spiritual. German, French, and Scottish, they all gather together for a mass said by a Scottish minister. The mass is said in Latin, appealing to one of the connections between these men, a spiritual authority that operates independent of the authority of governments, that no longer belongs to any single language, or culture, or people. The subversive effect of Christians acting like Christians, forgiving and loving their neighbors, is not lost on the powers that be, that have to present their own version of doctrine and reframe genocide as holy work against an inhuman horde. As one commander says in the aftermath, you can't execute 200 men, recognizing that if the entire mass of soldiers dying on the front lines were to stop hating the enemy, there would instantly be no war for the generals to direct and with which to inspire the public.
This is what's so sad about Joyeux Noel, is knowing that the truce didn't continue, that those who weren't on the front line on Christmas Eve did restore order, and that most of the men who took a risk and climbed out of their trench were buried somewhere on that same field. The final image of the film is heartbreaking, German soldiers shut up in a box car being sent off to the Russian Front where they will have a fresh set of strangers to kill, far from the friends they made on Christmas Eve. As the train leaves, they hum the song the Scottish soldiers taught them, "I'm Dreaming of Home". There is a powerful image, Germans in a box car (with their Jewish lieutenant), being sent off to die in a bloodbath that killed an entire generation of men, making the point that this genocide was no more noble than any other.
I was also struck by the opening, with children in three countries reciting wartime rhetoric in a classroom like a book report. There's something very curious about how we sometimes only recognize the grotesqueness in our public discourse from our children, when it's wrong for them to repeat what the views of their elders. Jon Stewart has exploited this to great effect with the children reading transcripts of political pundits arguing on TV, undressing everything the way only children can, where there is no excuse of hyperbole or point of view, and we must decide if we believe these things to be true, before passing them on as fact.
It is an uplifting film, even in its sadness, for reminding us of what kind of people we should like to be at Christmas, if we can't do it the rest of the year. It was made by French filmmakers last year, and it's nice to see despite the animosity towards the French over the war in Iraq some of them found it in their hearts to tell a story about soldiers far from home, when so many American and British soldiers are spending Christmas in hellish conditions. God bless them all and keep them safe.
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