Technology giveth and taketh away in this melancholy

CHARENTE LIBRE – Jeudi 3 décembre 2015
Busan Film Review: ‘Cafard’
OCTOBER 3, 2015 | 08:16PM PT
Technology giveth and taketh away in this melancholy
motion-capture tribute to Belgian soldiers who fought in
WWI.
Justin Chang
Chief Film Critic
The horror and futility of war are conveyed in terms both stilted and
striking in “Cafard,” Flemish animator Jan Bultheel’s melancholy
tribute to the 400-plus Belgian soldiers who fought as part of an
armored-car division on the Eastern Front in World War I. Told from
the fictionalized perspective of a world-champion wrestler seeking to
right a terrible wrong through the spilling of German blood, this
straightforward tale of revenge, loss, survival and self-reckoning
gains as much as it loses from the use of motion capture: With its
simple forms, bold colors, nondescript faces and detailed CGI
backgrounds, the visual style blends realism and abstraction in ways
that are undeniably arresting, if not always dramatically effective. Still,
with enough appreciative attention from animation buffs and festival
audiences, the arthouse-worthy curio could take its rightful place
among the many new features observing the Great War’s centenary.
The graphic influence of up-to-the-minute video-game technology is
apparent from the opening crane shot that brings us into the Belgian city of
Ostend in August 1914, just in time to witness the terrible violation of a 15year-old girl named Mimi (Maud Brethenoux) by a pack of German soldiers.
Half a world away, professional wrestler Jean Mordant (Wim Willaert), has
just been crowned world champion in Buenos Aires when news of the
attack on his daughter sends him rushing home to Ostend. Feeling enraged
and helpless, especially since the traumatized Mimi can’t remember which
or even how many officers assaulted her, Jean becomes determined to
strike back at the Germans. He ultimately joins the Corps Expeditionnaire
des Autos-Canons-Mitrailleuses, or the ACM, a new Belgian military
battalion that will presumably enable them to wipe out the Germans from
the safety of heavily armored vehicles.
Also enlisting alongside Jean are his trusty old coach, Victor (Sebastian
Dewaele), and his randy young nephew, Guido (Maarten Thomas Ketels),
who’s eager to see more than one type of action on the war front. But the
men are almost immediately overtaken by a tedious lack of purpose. A
strategic miscalculation results in the ACM’s unexpected transfer to Russia,
where there’s little for the men to do but wait and drink. Jean’s experience
does brighten considerably when he meets a lovely Russian nurse, Jelena
(Dinara Drukarova); the fact that she has a husband does little to prevent a
mutual attraction from developing. Elsewhere, the men enjoy a warm,
earthy camaraderie with their brothers-at-arms, who name their armored
vehicle Cafard, or “Cockroach,” in honor of its ostensible indestructibility.
And our hero’s widespread fame — everyone seems to know who the great
Jean Mordant is — helps get him out of a tight spot on more than one
occasion.
But wherever he goes — and “Cafard,” following the surreal trajectory of the
ACM itself, will ultimately take him as far as Mongolia, China, and the
distant shores of the U.S. — Jean remains haunted by the inescapable
memory of what Mimi endured and continues to endure in Ostend.
Bultheel’s movie thus becomes a chronicle of one man’s disillusionment,
not only with his glorious notions of heroism, but with the very idea of
revenge; Jean’s one act of violent payback, in which he attacks a downed
German military pilot, proves singularly unsatisfying. And the price of
personal vengeance rises all the more steeply as the tides of history — and
of sheer rotten luck — have their way with Jean and his men, whether it’s
the onset of the Russian Revolution or a freak ambush in the Siberian
wilderness.
While its dispassionate look at the war experience is refreshingly devoid of
jingoism, all in all this is the sort of moral and psychological portrait that
would have been better served by a more artful approach to character
design. The virtues of motion capture are evident in the way that the
characters’ physical gestures and actions feel fully inhabited by real actors,
but it’s debatable whether that even counts as compensation, given how
hard it is to forge a meaningful emotional connection to such vaguely
formed, avatar-style faces. (It doesn’t help matters that the visual style
seems to emphasize facial blemishes to an off-putting degree.) A love
scene late in the proceedings evokes admiration for the filmmakers’
determination to reclaim animation as a grown-up storytelling medium, but
it’s too crudely rendered, in the visual sense, to achieve anywhere near the
intended level of intimacy.
Which is not to say that a minutely detailed, big-budget photorealistic
approach (seen to such eerie, soulless effect in Robert Zemeckis’ “The
Polar Express” and “Beowulf”) would have been much of an improvement.
To their credit, Bultheel and his crew seem to understand that the human
face is but one possible register of emotion, and they seem to have
deliberately stylized their canvas in a way that naturally draws the eye away
from the characters and toward the background. Though the film is being
presented only in 2D, the occasional long, swooping “camera” movements
enhance the illusion of depth and movement, and the buildings and
landscapes have a design simplicity and a richness of color that proves
remarkably atmospheric.
On a scene-by-scene basis, there’s a briskness and choppiness to the
storytelling in “Cafard” that suggests the same material would not have held
up to scrutiny in live-action form. In animated form, however, its narrative
economy has its virtues, working in concert with the visuals and the music
(particularly the recurrence of a song, “When All Is Lost,”
poignantly performed by the Belgian pianist-singer Ann Pierle) to create a
haunting spareness of effect. The movie leaves us with the sense of a dark,
war-ravaged dreamscape, quickly conjured and then just as quickly
whisked away, back into the long-lost memories of those who endured it.