New adaptation of ‘Nothing New on the Front’ recalls the disgust that humanity awakens

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Wherever you take an account, the First World War (1914-1918) was an immense stupidity, with its 17 million deaths, between civilians and military. In their midst, 3 million uniforms fell on the eastern front, which was at the top of the map of France, with trenches that had barely moved over the course of four years. There, Germans killed Frenchmen, and Frenchmen killed Germans.

The war was a confrontation between crude nationalisms, without the more epic and ideological content of the following world conflict, in which the priority was to end Nazi totalitarianism. The irrationality of the First World War became a good reason for the re-emergence of pacifism.

It emerged from partisan politics to literature, with the work of poets and writers such as the Frenchman Guillaume Apollinaire, the American Ernest Hemingway and the British JRR Tolkien (“The Lord of the Rings”). Much more committed to pacifism were the German novelists Ernst Jünger (“Storms of Steel”) and the author that interests us here, Erich Maria Remarque, who in 1929 published “Nothing New on the Front”.

For it was precisely the third adaptation of this text that the São Paulo Film Festival showed and Netflix launched it on streaming. This is an excellent film by the German Edward Berger. The previous adaptations were American and were directed by Lewis Milestone (1930) and Delbert Mann (1979).

But any scenic direction would be eclipsed by Remarque himself, a character who resisted Hitler – he went into exile in the USA – and adhered to what at the beginning of the last century was considered vanity or dandyism.

Two examples in his rich sentimental life. He was for three years the faithful boyfriend of Marlene Dietrich, a sex symbol from Germany to Hollywood, and married, and died beside her, in 1970, an actress named Marion Levy, known as Paulette Goddard. Herself, Charlie Chaplin’s ex-wife.

But let’s look at “Nothing New on the Front,” whose title reflects the almost nonexistent territorial conquest in this static example of trench warfare. It wasn’t a monotonous war just because of the industrial amount of corpses it produced. In this unhealthy scenario appears Paul Baümer, 19, whose spirit had been instilled by a professor, for whom patriotism consisted in ending the war threat from French neighbors. But war as a form of expression of this feeling is a dangerous tedium.

That’s what the film portrays in more than two hours in length. The consensus that it was necessary to put an end to the carnage is present in the German military delegation that negotiates the armistice in November 1919. In front of it, a boastful and circumstantially victorious French delegation, headed by Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the last commander of the Allied forces in that conflict .

Meanwhile, the soldiers around Baumer die like flies, without any project of grandeur, as happened with Katczinsky, the only oldest character in the group, killed by a shotgun blast from the son of a peasant from whom he had stolen an egg. Or Albert Kropp, the most intelligent of the young men in the novel’s text, hit by a projectile in the eleventh hour of the war.

War is also filthy because it resorts, as it really did, to chemical weapons. Soldiers carry oxygen masks in their backpacks as an antidote. A group of 40 in uniform, however, is surrounded by the enemy and perishes from the gas. The dead are scattered like animals on the dirt floor of a dirty, dark farm.

The film is astute in terms of photography. It was shot in color, but all scenes tend towards grey, from the chronically cloudy skies of the French winter to the absence of color in the trenches, where soldiers feed or handle weapons with a crust of dried clay on the skin of their faces. Humans, if they can be called that, are disgusting. And colorless warfare itself is exemplary disgusting.

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