Desert of Desire

2010_9_ 17 The Desert of Desire

Alain Corneau, a well-respected French Director, died last week. The only movie of his that I have seen was “All the Mornings of the World,” which I enjoyed immensely. I decided I should get online and order one of his films from NETFLIX. I chose “Fort Saganne” with Gerard Depardieu, Catherine Deneuve and Sophie Merceau, who was very young at the time and looked pretty and breakable, like a 19th century doll. The film was released in 1984. I was surprised how good Depardieu looked. I was used to seeing him with more pounds on his frame. Here he was thin, trim and handsome, like a rugby player. He was about 35 at the time. How he looked made me remember how Brando looked before his fatty inflation. I compared Depardieu to Brando in “The Last Tango in Paris,” the last movie in which he looked like himself. Corivan had the good fortune to work with Depardieu before he grew large, when he looked like an athlete and could handle physical acting.

“Fort Saganne” starts with our hero, Charles Saganne, as a mere boy looking through a lattice date that was entrance to a French Estate in the countryside. He is clearly in a state of envy. Out of nowhere the boy told his dad that someday that house would be his. It was a young prole dreaming about what he didn’t have and probably never would. When of age he joined the French Foreign Legion where he began a career that took him to heights he never would imagine as a boy. He was sent to the Sahara in 1911 and fell in love with the desert, its bigness, its silence and its space—the majesty it had under heaven and the stars. But this movie, in a backhanded way, is a pre-WW I story, a personal tale about one man and how his life meshed with history. Naturally, a girl had to be on the horizon. It was a very young Sophie Merceau as Madeleine of Saint-llette who became his love. But her parents would not hear of it because Saganne was a nobody in 1911. Their daughter had to marry a somebody.

The first thing Charles had to deal with in the French-controlled Sahara was his commanding officer, Debreuilh (Philippe Noiret) who goads him on to several dangerous missions and a few heroic actions, one of which nets him a medal, the highest honor his country could pay to a military man. When he becomes a hero Dubreuilh sends him to Paris to convince the government to press their military advantage and destroy insurgents under the leadership of Muslim fanatic. Saganne is turned down but he soon forgets about that failure with a great success: a passionate affair with Louise Tissot (Deneuve), the journalist who had written a critical article about him. But alas, it came to an end after a disagreement and they went their separate ways. Deneuve, who was 40 at the time, was the ultimate cool blonde, the Ice Queen and the secret slut, which Bunel had shown so brilliantly in “Belle de Jour.” David Thomson got it right when he said she was “perhaps the greatest cool blonde, forever hinting at intimations of depravity.” In “Belle de Jour” she played a bored housewife who took an afternoon job as a prostitute and was quite content with her split life.

Charles eventually finds Madeleine on one of later his trips home. She declares her love for him and her parents no longer object to him as he is now a national hero. The newspaper kept writing about him as a brave soldier. He keeps saying he did no more than what any good Legionnaire would have done in the circumstance. He and Madeleine marry and move into the estate we saw at the beginning of the film, which he can now afford to buy, thus fulfilling a promise he had made to himself as a boy. He impregnates his new wife before he goes to war again, only this time it World War I, the so-called “Great War.”

I knew how “Fort Saganne” was going to end—had to end. I knew the story ended in 1914, the same year that WW I started. Ironically, he ran into Louise just as he was preparing to go to the Western Front. She was now a Red Cross nurse. They kiss and embrace and he tells her he loves his wife but he admits he loves her more. Before he climbs on the truck he pauses to look back at Nurse Louise and said to himself, “Don’t move; just stay like you are forever.” The scene reeks with sadness, beauty and destiny, with a romantic longing that is going to end badly. The next time we see him he is in the trenches about to lead a charge against the German machine guns. His men are slaughter as they make this mad dash to their deaths. He is the last man left, still the surviving hero. He pauses but then stands up, fires his pistol and gets shot in the chest. He had stood there as if he was invincible. Somehow they got him to the field hospital where a nurse manages to tell him his wife had a baby boy; he then expires. A field doctor checks his pulse to make sure he is dead and then tells the nurse, “Throw the body into the water; we don’t have any more room for bodies here.” What an inglorious end for a tragic hero!

The contrast between fighting in the Sahara and the “Fields of Flanders,” could not be more vivid. Corneau was making his point perfectly clear: the fighting in the desert fit better in the 18th or 19th century, whereas the fighting in WW I was simply wholesale slaughter. In the desert you fought one on one, bayonet against bayonet; the numbers were smaller and personal bravery meant something. And bodies were buried in the sand, not cast aside willy-nilly.

Yes, WW I was our first all-out technological war and it was led and sustained by generals of such stupidity that they kept sending men to certain death rather than trying different tactics. Saganne’s honor and bravery in the Sahara was as vast as the desert, but on the battlefield of the Western Front he was cannon fodder and food for the fishes