Macedonian Front, World War I. Captain Conan leads a French Army unit to attack the Bulgarian Army behind the trenches. After the end of the war, the army boards a train to Bucharest and settles there, waiting for further instructions. Faced with nothing to do, the soldiers lack discipline and steal from the locals, but Conan always defends them in front of his superiors. Officer Norbert becomes the prosecutor assigned to investigate the offences, and scorns Conan for having an affair with a woman, and then throwing out her husband down the stairs, who broke his knee. Disguised soldiers rob a night club, and are arrested and sentenced mildly. Young soldier Erlane deserted and is accused of giving the Bulgarian Army secret information about the position of the French on the front, and is also convicted. The army is sent east, to join the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, fighting Bolsheviks. After the war, Norbert meets Conan again, who is back doing his old haberdasher job, and who is diagnosed to have only six months to live due to an illness.
"Captain Conan" is a rather disjointed depiction of the lives of soldiers: the opening and the ending segments (with a combined running time of 30 minutes) show the battle part of their profession, while the whole middle segment (100 minutes) shows the boring part of their job, when they have to wait in Bucharest for months for further instructions, yet their boredom kind of contaminated this overlong and overstretched bulk of the movie itself. The most was achieved out of the main actor, the hyper-energetic Philippe Torreton as the title character, who minimizes and covers up the looting of the soldiers during peacetime, assuming that they are conditioned to be warriors on the front, and that such instincts cannot just go away when they get back to the normal life. Some of the lines are good ("What is your idea of a victory?" - "When I can raise my head up and walk everywhere without having to fear that it will get blown up"; "Did you steal the farmer's chicken?" - "Yes, but I returned it cooked!"; "The Germans had better uniforms than you." - "Well, we still kicked the Germans' butts with these uniforms"), but the movie is mostly too talkative and with conventional dialogue, exhausting with too much babble and always the same repetitions of variations of Conan defending his soliers in front of other officers. Allegedly, the battle sequence were unrehearsed, and thus they feel incredibly kinetic and energetic, since the actors didn't know what to do, giving them a feeling of real-life chaos. For instance, a soldier arrives at the hill to give Conan a letter with orders, but as he is about to leave, suddenly an explosion goes off in front of him, so he dodges right. A bonus is a rare film depiction of the Allied intervention against Communists in the Russian Civil War at the end. Like most of film directed by Bertrand Tavernier, this one is also good, but there is still something missing to be considered a true classic of great cinema, some focused inspiration that would align all these random episodes into a tight whole.
Grade:++
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