Judging from the current crop of movies, the French look back on their colonial era in Indochina with nostalgia rather than anger-as a doomed love affair. Love (or, more precisely, sex) is the subject of “L’Amant,” based on a novel by Marguerite Duras about the sexual awakening of a young French girl in Indochina in the 1920s. In “Indochine,” Catherine Deneuve plays a rich plantation owner who finds romance amid the first stirrings of Vietnam’s communist revolution. And Schoendoerffer calls his movie about Dien Bien Phu “a film of love”-even though he covered the battle as a young French Army photographer and spent four hellish months in Vietnamese prison camps after the fall of the French stronghold in 1954. Since Hanoi allows French directors to film on location in Vietnam (unlike American filmmakers, who have had to shoot their Vietnam War movies in the Philippines), Schoendoerffer could have filmed at the actual site of the 57-day siege. He refused: 4,000 French soldiers were killed in action there, and another 8,000 died of wounds or in captivity. “I didn’t want to make bombs explode on those hills, which are sacred to me,” he says.
Schoendoerffer makes no apologies for having waited three decades to explore the battle on film. “There is wisdom in not tackling some subjects right off the bat,” he says. “Americans grab their sufferings right away and try to solve problems with confrontations of frightening brutality, such as in their films on Vietnam.” There is a difference, too, he maintains, in how France dealt with its humiliation in Vietnam. “The Americans were disheartened, though they weren’t defeated,” he says. “We were defeated, but we weren’t disheartened.”
If beautiful women and gallant soldiers come to mind when the French think of Indochina, perhaps it is just as well. The Algerian legacy offers little room for such lost-cause romanticism. Some 23,500 French soldiers died in the eight-year conflict, which ended in 1962 when Algeria gained independence. As many as 1 million Algerian Muslims may also have died, and nearly that many pieds noirs–European settlers, most of French origin-had to flee the country they had always been taught was French. Today, the pieds noirs who resettled in France remain embittered by the loss of Algeria. Right-wing extremists who have made opposition to North African immigration a national issue draw on just such bitterness. With its unforgiving harshness and its political, racial and moral complexities, the war in Algeria was the kind that never really ends-and that an outpouring of books and movies is only beginning to explore.
