Uranus

What did you do during the war? It's 1945 in a little town in France after the Liberation. War-weary citizens are attempting to resume their pre-Vichy lives amidst the architectural rubble and makeshift routines. It's a time of purges and counter-extremism. Former resistance fighters and Communist party members are the new ideology police. Former collaborators with the Vichy regime are hoping that their complicities will be forgotten or, at least, tolerated. And probably the vast majority are like the Archambaud family, survivalists who've worn their allegiances like camouflage, trying to fit in without being noticed. Director Berri (Jean de Florette, Manon of the Spring) seems to be aiming for some grand humanistic statement about how we are all pawns of history and how each individual is a bundle of contradictions and is neither all good, nor all bad. Toward that end, he introduces a cast of characters who each represent different facets of the political spectrum. Yet these characters never emerge as anything more than broad types, which is too bad considering the wonderful group of actors gathered here. Mostly they just talk their way through Uranus, philosophizing about their guilt, hopes, memories and liberation. Everyone, it seems, has got something to rationalize. Many times throughout the film, different characters state the belief that all human beings are hypocrites, yet they are wonderful creatures nevertheless. N'est ce pas? Well I'm not so sure about that. Hypocrisy is an undeniably human trait though I don't think that quality makes it unreproachable. Part of the problem with Uranus may be its source material, the 1948 novel by French writer Marcel Ayme. Ayme was a journalist and writer who, during the war, contributed to various Vichy and anti-Semitic publications, though his biographers contend that he never expressed any outright Nazi sympathy. After the Occupation he responded indignantly to the purges and executions of collaborators and wrote vitriolically of the period. Uranus belongs to that time. The movie substitutes more humanistic designs for the novel's caustic and critical views but the end result comes out blurred. All the movie ever really tells us is that people do the darnedest things. C'est la vie.