Uranus
1990 History / Comedy / Drama   
 
Credits
  
 
 
Summary
Little by little, normality returns to a small French village after World War II.  The village is as scarred by petty recriminations between its inhabitants as by the very evident signs of bombings.  The classics teacher Watrin has to give lessons in a café owned by the alcoholic Léopold.  The latter’s enemy is Rochard, a railway worker and a fervent Communist.  When he learns that Watrin is sheltering a collaborator, Maxime Loin, Rochard denounces Léopold to the police.  The settling of old scores has only just begun…

Review
Based on a controversial 1948 novel by the eminent writer Marcel Aymé, Uranus depicts some unpalatable truths about France’s experiences under Nazi Occupation.  Contrary to the popular notion that everyone bar a handful of nasty collaborators was a resistance fighter who spent all day blowing up trains of Nazi convoys, Uranus tells a very different story, one with a far more believable assessment of human nature.  Whilst Claude Berri’s adaptation doesn’t quite do justice to the original novel, with most of the characters reduced to eccentric caricatures, it does get its message across very effectively.  The post-war purges, which saw hundreds of French men and women executed for alleged collaboration, may not have been on the same scale as the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, but they are equally as shameful – particularly when many thousands of collaborators switched sides as soon as it became clear where the war was going to end.  Uranus is a thought-provoking period drama, whose main delight are the over-the-top but sympathetic performances from such stars as Gérard Depardieu and Philippe Noiret.

© James Travers 2004


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