France/West Germany. 1981.
Crew
Director – Christian de Chalonge, Screenplay – Christian de Chalonge & Pierre Dumayet, Dialogue – Pierre Dumayet, (Uncredited) Based on the Novel by Robert Merle, Producer – Claude Nejar, Photography – Jean Penzer, Music – Gabriel Yared, Special Effects – Jacques Martin & Andre Trielli, Production Design – Max Douy. Production Company – Nef Diffusion/Antenne 2/Films Gibe/C.D.G./Telecip/Makifilms/Stella Films GmbH.
Cast
Michel Serrault (Emmanuel Comte), Jacques Dutronc (Colin), Jacques Villeret (Momo), Robert Dhery (Peyssou), Hanns Zischler (The Veterinarian), Penelope Palmer (Evelyne), Jean-Louis Trintignant (Fulbert), Jacqueline Parent (Cathy)
Plot
In the village of Malevil, a group of locals come to talk to Emmanuel Comte about town planning. He is at work in his wine cellar and invites them to taste some of his wine. As they are doing so, an explosion goes off outside. They pick themselves up from the debris to realise that a nuclear attack has occurred. The rest of the town is in rubble. In the ruins, they try to piece together a precarious living with what supplies they have. As the fallout clears, they organise to begin farming anew. Problems begin when they encounter other survivors.
Nuclear War films were big in the 1950s and 60s with the likes of Five (1951) and On the Beach (1959) through Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Fail-Safe (1964) and The War Game (1965). As the political climate of the Cold War eased off, this mini-genre died away. However, with Ronald Reagan’s ramping up of East-West tensions again in the 1980s, there was a renewed spate of nuclear films. The high-profile works among these were US-made efforts such as The Day After (1983), Special Bulletin (1983), Testament (1983) and WarGames (1983). Elsewhere, there were efforts for British television such as Whoops Apocalypse (1981), Threads (1984) and Rules of Engagement (1989), as well as the animated theatrical film When the Wind Blows (1986), and from other countries the Japanese anime Barefoot Gen (1983), the Canadian-made Countdown to Looking Glass (1984) and the Soviet-made Letters from a Dead Man (1986)
Malevil came from Christian de Chalonge, a director who emerged in the late 1960s and gained some awards acclaim with films such as Other People’s Money (1978) and The Roaring Forties (1982). de Chalonge only made one other film that falls into genre material with Dr Petiot (1990) based on a true-life serial killer who operated in Nazi-occupied France.
The film was adapted from a 1972 novel by Robert Merle (1908-2004), a French professor of English literature. In genre material, Merle also wrote the 1967 novel that became the basis of the SF film The Day of the Dolphin (1973) wherein George C. Scott teaches dolphins to talk. However, Merle was unhappy with the way that the film substantially departed from his novel and asked that his name be removed and so all that we get is the credit ‘Based on the book’ and the name of the publisher.
In this regard, the film dumps many of the latter sections of the book with the character of Fulbert. In the book, Fulbert, the leader of the other community, is a priest and runs a religious dictatorship, keeping people under his thrall by his stranglehold on supplies. His appearance here is reduced to a handful of scenes and a couple of suggestions that he runs a dictatorial community, but no more than that. Also dropped has been the debate over the fact there are only a limited number of women that have to be shared among the men
Malevil starts as a pastorale. The film opens with beautiful and idyllic shots of the French countryside as we see the farms and surrounding area before everything occurs. We are introduced to the principals discussing matters of town planning and enjoying a glass of wine in Michel Serrault’s wine cellar. Within minutes of opening, the nuclear detonation occurs – shown as no more than a flash of light outside and the fall of rubble inside the cellar. The survivors emerge to find a blasted and ruined landscape where the buildings are totalled, ash is everywhere and the sky has turned grey-black. (The producers apparently leased an area of countryside and then burned everything to the ground to achieve the results).
Christian de Chaolnge is undeniably effective in conveying the devastation. We get scenes of the survivors trying to regroup and scouring the ruins for supplies. There is an appealing scene where they test for the radioactivity of the rain by taking a photo to see if it has turned black and then gleefully run out into and roll about in the downpour when it comes out clear. All before the discovery of plants blooming and the tentative efforts to start growing crops anew.
The film is beset by what I can only call a certain Frenchness. By which I mean, it is common in French cinema to eschew standard dramatic forms of Hollywood storytelling. A more Hollywood version of Malevil would have ended up like The Day After – a soap opera crosscut of characters from different walks of life and their mini-dramas, followed by shock as the bomb hits and the survivors then seen wandering the ruins. Here the effect is more the incidental, decentralised focus of French cinema – long scenes where nothing much seems to happen. A lot of the film is just survivors picking through the rubble, sitting down to meals and the like without any real drama to scenes. It might be worth contrasting Malevil to the one other major depiction of the Post-Apocalyptic world that came out that year – Mad Max 2 (1981), which offered a version of survival that was adrenalised and kinetic, drawn from the Western and action film, something that sits at almost diametric contrast to Christian de Chalonge’s pastoral placidity.
Most of the time, the vividness of the world carries the film. Where this becomes problematic is in the latter sections where Robert Merle’s much more elaborate narrative has been severely condensed to a handful of scenes as marauders attack, where a contingent from Malevil visit Fulbert and find unsavoury things going on but decide to trade anyway. This is followed by a confrontation where a woman escaped from Fulbert’s group (Jacqueline Parent) seeks refuge at Malevil and they take a stand against Fulbert’s efforts to reclaim her. These are scenes, the last of these excepted, that seem to almost demand a far more dramatic treatment but where Christian de Chalonge’s laidback manner seems to miss that.
There is also the ending where it seems that the people of Malevil have achieved an idyllic peace. They have begun farming and there are scenes of them happily at work in the fields, now represented by a perfect sunny day where the blackened and blasted world of the early scenes has been banished. This is abruptly shattered where, with some irony, the hope of government aid that they held out for arrives in the form of soldiers insisting on taking everybody away to safety in helicopters. As the abrupt disruption to their idyllic lifestyle indicates, this may not be a good thing. The last image of the film is that of a handful of the younger people making their way down the river on a raft while a horse runs freely along the riverbank.
The Robert Merle book was latter remade as a tv movie Malevil (2009).
Full film available here