BRIAN VINER reviews All Quiet on the Western Front

2023-02-17

BRIAN VINER: Whisper it, but if All Quiet On The Western Front wasn’t German, it wouldn’t get such acclaim

All Quiet on the Western Front (15, 143 minutes)

Verdict: Powerful but flawed

Rating:

The Netflix film All Quiet On The Western Front landed in October on the streaming platform, and since then has become one of its most-watched foreign-language films, racking up over 100 million viewing hours.

So there’s every chance you’ve already seen it and if not, you may well get a nudge on Sunday evening. Remarkably for a German picture, it is the most-nominated film at this year’s Baftas.

But is it as brilliant as so many people say, or is its success partly due to the novelty of it telling the harrowing but oft-told story of World War I from the German point of view?

Certainly, it makes a change to see lavishly moustachioed German rather than British generals portrayed as buffoons, blithely willing to send once-idealistic young men to their near-certain deaths.

The story, based like the acclaimed 1930 film on the anti-war novel by Erich Maria Remarque, follows the tribulations of a teenage soldier called Paul (Felix Kammerer) almost up to the moment of the November 1918 armistice.

BRIAN VINER: The Netflix film All Quiet On The Western Front landed in October on the streaming platform, and since then has become one of its most-watched foreign-language films

Can the sensible, decent Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Bruhl), a leading politician and head of the German delegation at the peace talks, bring the carnage to an end in time to save Paul?

Director and co-writer Edward Berger does not hold back on the brutal realities of trench warfare, tossing us crumbs of light relief, as when Paul and his brother-in-arms Kat (Albrecht Schuch) steal a goose from a French farmhouse.

But there is a glib expression, ‘misery porn’, which I generally try to avoid using. It means the depiction of suffering so unrelenting that it seems to verge on the fetishistic, and rather to my regret — because I can see what a powerful film it is — that is how I felt about All Quiet On The Western Front.

It is superbly shot, ably acted and the dialogue feels wholly convincing. But if it does triumph at Sunday’s Baftas ceremony, I’m not sure it will be for those reasons. I think it will be because it’s German, and in my view that’s not reason enough.

B.V.

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