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Film: Stranded
Release date: 24th January 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 114 mins
Director: Hugues Martin & Sandra Martin
Starring: Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet, Thierry Fremont, Said Taghmaoui, Cyril Raffaelli, Aurelien Wiik
Genre: Action/Horror/War
Studio: E1
Format: DVD
Country: France/Morocco
Originally released under the title Djinns, this French debut from directing husband and wife partnership Hugues and Sandra Martin comes to DVD. The North African desert is the home of the Djinn, a group of invisible demons intent on protecting their home from a platoon of French soldiers on a rescue mission.
Michel (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) is young, nervous and accompanying a platoon of experienced soldiers in the Algerian desert as they track down a downed plane in the French-Algerian decolonisation war of the late 1950s and early ‘60s. He struggles to adapt to the overwhelming heat and his lack of experience means he is constantly playing catch-up to the grizzled, battle weary veterans. As they slowly make their way through the desert, they eventually make contact with their enemies and take hold of a small village nestled in the sand dunes.
All is not what it seems, however, as the young recruit begins to experience terrifying visions of near-invisible, demonic figures who are capable of possessing their victims, turning them into murderous vessels with only one thing on their minds. These creatures are a known threat to the locals, with the elder of the tribe appointed protector of the village. She claims to know why Michel can see these creatures, and as the soldiers are picked off one-by-one, it seems he is the only one with the power to protect his remaining comrades and the innocent inhabitants of the town…
Like many similarly themed films, such as Daniel Myrick’s The Objective or Michael J Basset’s Deathwatch, the ‘group of soldiers stalked by unseen threat’ has been done many times before. Unfortunately, the Martin’s effort is by no means a shining example of this type of film. It starts off interestingly, with a mysterious figure staggering down a desolate road handcuffed to a silver briefcase. This perfectly introduced the element of the unknown that accompanies the eerie desert. In fact, the desert is the most interesting element of the film. It is almost treated as a character in its own right, and its otherness offers much more tension and suspense than the Djinns ever could. It is obviously a dangerous place to be, and the soldier’s ordeal is exacerbated by the treacherous terrain.
The clichéd character types of most ‘squad’ movies are all present and correct, which adds a distinct sense of unoriginality to proceedings. Michel, the new recruit, clutches his treasured 8mm camera and continually bemoans his situation, while the handsome ladies man, Saria (Aurélien Wiik), befriends him and helps him along when he struggles. Malovitch (Matthias Van Khache) is the company’s resident veteran. Battle scarred and hard as nails, he ticks every box of the strong, silent type. However, despite being tired clichés, these characters are well played, and offer a decent dynamic as a group of men unwillingly thrown together and forced to face insurmountable odds.
Again, like many films of this type, the director unwisely chooses to reveal his monsters too early on, despite the fact that they are almost invisible. During the first forty-five minutes or so, the Martin’s manage to build a credible tension that works well with the slow pace and meandering conversations of the squad. That is until they discover the crashed plane and bodies of their comrades, and are met with a sandstorm and resistance from the local militia. Taking refuge in the dunes surrounding a small village, Michel begins to experience visions of the demons. Quite simply, the CGI used to create the transparent terrors are not good enough to warrant such a blatant reveal, and leave the audience feeling nonchalant towards their presence. The sense of tension and paranoia is, however, utilised quite effectively as the Djinns begin to possess the soldiers, and an interesting dynamic of not knowing who to trust takes over as members of the team are slowly turned into murderous psychopaths, one by one.
It is at this point, however, that the directors choose to undo their good work of building this sense of unease. The potential for decent horror is squandered with uninteresting climaxes to each member’s possession, and a far-fetched Macguffin involving Michel’s role as protector of the village. The entire second half of the film leaves a sense of flatness and unoriginality that disappoints after the promising start.
Undoubtedly, the most impressive element of the film is the cinematography, with the potentially unexciting desert coming to life with beautiful, sweeping long shorts of the massive dunes, and the isolated crew mere pinpoints on the screen as they traverse the treacherous sands. The opportunity for the directors to contrast this sense of openness with the claustrophobia of the confines of the tiny village is squandered, however, resulting in a sub-par creature feature that fails to ignite much excitement.
With Stranded, Hugues and Sandra Martin have somewhat missed the opportunity to present a worthy successor to other superior examples of similarly themed films. By no means a disaster, but still remarkably unremarkable, and too familiar to leave much of an impression. RB
Film: The Undercover War
Release date: 3rd January 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 97 mins
Director: Nicolas Steil
Starring: Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, Marianne Basler, Judith Davis, Arthur Dupont, Pierre Niney
Genre: Drama/War
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: Luxembourg/Switzerland
Cinema is motion. Thriving on the kinetic, its action heroes are proactive do-gooders. But what if they’re impotent, incarcerated, or stripped of devious gadgetry? Then they do the right thing. A dark moral vision, The Undercover War frames ghostly non-combatants, dissenters whose resolute inaction is valorous. Eschewing the TNT-stoked inferno of the battleground, the film plays out life-or-death scenarios in banal surrounds. This is a eulogy to kitchen-sink crusaders; little heroes whose small glories are all but invisible to the annals.
Stark title sequence yields to stark opening shot, which lingers over a debris strewn pathway. Complimenting the tone of austerity, a voiceover grimly orients the camera-eye. Luxembourg, WW2. Young men are being drafted by the Nazis. Their options are to serve, betraying their country, or to find sanctuary, whilst eluding detection. Hide and seek – for mortal stakes.
Youthful student Francois has been sent to Germany to study by his industrialist father but, repelled by his university’s abhorrent ideological agenda, quits, returns home and nobly drops out. Fleeing into the cavernous refuge of a deserted mine, he faces indefinite exile as a so-called “réfractaire.”
Confined with paranoid leftists and his local love rival, it quickly becomes apparent that the most pressing threat to his survival may emerge from the enemy within…
Directorial debut of European producer Nicholas Steil, The Undercover War acts as simultaneous commemoration and history lesson. Whilst he claims that the film’s moral position is noncommittal, and “no sides were being taken” during an interview, it’s obvious where his instinctive loyalties lie. Francois – a probable analogue of the director himself – is a naïve, 20-year-old youth who eventually comes of age in the film, maturing from passivity to active resistant. Shunning the legacy of his compromised paterfamilias, Francois’s faith in the cause is transformative. This powerful credo is announced in the first two words of narration: “War. Commitment.”
Luxembourg was a strategically significant, lossless conquest for the Nazis. Comprising just over 300,000 inhabitants, its policy of neutrality and lack of armed forces proved ineffectual talismans against Hitler’s expansionist blitzkrieg. Capitulating in 1940, the nation endured four tortuous years of occupation. Under the Nazi yoke, a policy of ‘Germanification’ was enforced and national identity progressively erased. Berets were banned, and the French language prohibited as Luxembourg became a clone proxy of the Reich. Steil’s account predictably depicts Nazi brutality, but is most disarming when the violence assumes the form of toxic rhetoric, projected across a classroom.
A lecture at Francois’s university evangelises the regime’s blood-curdling, childlike ideology: “Two worlds face each other. The Aryan and the subhuman . . .” Light vs. night, locked in eternal conflict. Refusing to join the approving clamour of his peers, Francois is already marked as a man alone. Ironically, he will shortly become a literal untermensch or ‘under man’ - confined to a stygian cavern. It’s here that Steil’s moral schematics assume a richer ambiguity. Moving beyond the goodies vs. baddies dynamic of the classic war film (and, indeed, of Nazi ideology), darkness breeds dissent amongst the grimy cabal.
Described by Francois as an “empire of the buried,” the mines are a paradoxical sanctuary-prison, which exaggerates tension between the draft dodgers. With large sections of the film’s duration spent underground, the Germans are a primarily unseen menace, but one that feeds a constant fear, amplifying the paranoid intensity of the men. There’s little resemblance to the derring-do of other resistance adventures, such as Melville’s Army Of The Shadows or Verhoeven’s Soldier Of Orange. Whilst both those filmmakers share Steil’s ennobling fatalism, they also embellish their narratives with conventional generic pleasures: detonations, assassinations, and sporadic action. Ironically, these are the very attractions exploitatively promised by The Undercover War’s DVD cover art, yet almost totally absent from the film.
Despite its calculating negation of one cliché, the film ultimately re-enacts another, familiar from the Vietnam War movie – that “Looking back, we did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves - and the enemy was within us” (c.f. Platoon). The entombed inmates are beset by physical tics, illness and periodic bouts of violent mania. It’s a hard cradle for fragile egos. Rival communists despise each other, and, owing to his father’s collaborator status, Francois himself is frequently considered suspect, at one point bound and facing imminent execution at the hand of supposed comrades. Exposing the group as an edgy, vacillating entity, Steil also lays bare its class fault-lines, a perspective rare for the genre. Francois is thus considered a double outsider; a bourgeois interloper incarcerated with bolshy, class conscious proles.
Steil’s protagonist ultimately finds redemption through self definition. Whereas films such as Apocalypse Now and Platoon evoke quasi-religious symbolism, The Undercover War’s low-key heroics seem to embody an existentialist attitude. Often considered as a philosophical response to the moral dilemmas of living under constant oppression, its exponents stressed the power of individual will, and the responsibility of exercising it. Whatever the circumstances, there is always a choice. Jean Paul Sartre, in his famous essay La Republique du Silence explains how, in the face of death from the oppressor, every minor act of resistance was at once a triumph and a mortal pledge:
“Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn commitment.”
A sombre endgame, The Undercover War offers no great escapes. Competent, if lacking in formal dazzle, the film’s reverent drama becomes sedate, lulling to a clammy checkmate. Whilst more downbeat than similar narratives, its predictable trajectory detracts from the realism Steil’s restrained direction seeks to evoke. Slaying, and then substituting a new-old mythos, the narrative itself feels imprisoned by the classic grammar of the combat film. Digestion-smoothing viewing for dozily patriotic Sunday afternoons, this is neo-traditional fare which doesn’t delve quite far enough beneath the shadows. DJO
In the desert, the enemy is not who you think!
It’s 1960 in the Algerian desert. A unit of elite soldiers are sent on a rescue mission in search of a missing aircraft. But they are not alone. Under constant attack by Algerian rebels, no-one anticipates that another, more deadly threat lies silently in wait.
A violent sand storm forces the troops to take refuge in an unchartered village deep in the desert. Taking its inhabitants and the rebels hostage, little do they know that the village is governed by a force far more powerful than any of them can imagine - and their invasion has violated their land.
Ignoring warnings to leave, as day turns to night, the evil enemy rises and as ranks are decimated one-by-one, they face the longest night of their lives.
Starring stunt legend Cyril Raffaelli (Die Hard 4.0, District 13) and Saïd Taghmaoui (G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra, Vantage Point).
Film: Stranded
Release date: 24th January 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 114 mins
Director: Hugues Martin & Sandra Martin
Starring: Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet, Thierry Fremont, Said Taghmaoui, Cyril Raffaelli, Aurelien Wiik
Genre: Action/Horror/War
Studio: E1
Format: DVD
Country: France/Morocco
It is May 1944 and Luxembourg has just been annexed by Nazi Germany. François (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), a young man who was forced to attend a German university by his fascist father, returns home.
Refusing to fight against the allies as a forced recruit, instead François chooses a clandestine life in the Resistance and joins other deserters in an abandoned mine, with the Liberation as his only hope.
Film: The Undercover War
Release date: 3rd January 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 97 mins
Director: Nicolas Steil
Starring: Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, Marianne Basler, Judith Davis, Arthur Dupont, Pierre Niney
Genre: Drama
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: Luxembourg/Switzerland
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