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4.5 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)

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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Time Out, Oct 31 2006

By

MICHAEL ACUNA (Southern California United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Joyeux No�l (DVD)

Though based on a true incident that took place in 1914, in the midst of a WWI battle among the Scots, the French and the Germans, Christian Carrion's film "Joyeux Noel" nonetheless has a dreamlike, other-worldly quality that says more about the state of our current international affairs than it does about Carrion's telling of this sad, sentimental tale.

Can you imagine a contemporary world in which countries at war with each other would stop the warring long enough to drink champagne, slug vodka, play cards and toast Christ's birth? Unfortunately the Bureaucrats and Politicians react to this spur-of-the-moment camaraderie among the different factions as they usually do: they condemn the participants and accuse them of treason.

All of the actors do a fine job of creating characters who genuinely feel like they are fighting for ideals and ideas that will have a lasting effect on their lives and that of their children. They are committed. They are also of course, innocent.

The ethereal Diane Kruger plays a classical singer, a Swede and therefore neutral but married to a German soldier who, through some personal machinations as well as a pass from Kaiser Wilhelm finds herself on the battlefield on that special night of 12/24/1914. She sings Gounod's "Ave Maria" to a rapt audience of soldiers attending Christmas Eve Mass. It is the moral and emotional center of the film as well as its highpoint.

"Joyeux Noel" is a nice reminder of a gentler time: a time when it was the moral and social imperative to always love your country, to always trust your leaders and to always cleave to your family. Unfortunately that time is long gone.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Everybody should see this movie, Dec 26 2006

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Anne-Marie Lozier "aml" (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Joyeux No�l (DVD)

A wonderful and uplifting story based on real World War I events where music is portrayed as a universal language and where the spirit of Christmas unites enemies.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful look back, Mar 7 2009

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Michael W. Perry (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Joyeux No�l (DVD)

This film is a moving dramatization of the spontaneous Christmas truce of 1914, during which soldiers on both sides met in no-man's land, sang hymns, played sports, and exchanged gifts. Needless to say, the generals, warm and well-fed in their far-from-the-front chateaux, were not happy about that and did their best to see it didn't repeat the following three Christmases of the war.

The film is well-done and almost even-handed in its presentation of soldiers from France, Germany and Scotland, except that the French soldiers, for some reason, seem less interesting than the Scottish and German. That's odd, since this 2005 film was apparently a French or Belgian production.

The film's other oddity is that the Scottish officer who participates in and is punished for his role the unofficial cease fire is apparently a Catholic priest (note his use of Latin), as it appears were most of his men. The Scots of that day were mostly Scotch Presbyterian, so I can''t explain that little anomaly. Maybe the French/Belgian producers didn''t know that. The European intelligentsia of today know very little about religion, hence their instinctive pandering to militant Islam. Religion scares them, so a scary religion seems normal.

Sadly, the Great War in which these men fought has become the Forgotten War. That's unfortunately, because all too many of our modern ills are rooted in that long-ago struggle over mere yards of blasted landscape. The years before the Great War represented the high-water mark in European influence on the world. Europe has never fully recovered from its enormous loses.

-Michael W. Perry, Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements That Led to Nazism and World War II

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4.0 out of 5 stars JOYEUX NOEL
I grew up hearing stories of both World Wars. My father told me about Christmas Eve when the fighting stopped and soldiers from both sides celebrating Christmas together, while... Read more

Published on Nov 17 2009 by Mohamjip