Week-end à Zuydcoote is director Henri Verneuil’s most ambitious – and daring – film, and should be considered one of his best works.  Although targeted at a mainstream audience, the film has an artistic quality about it which most of Verneuil’s films lack – it is remarkable that such a film is largely overlooked and forgotten today.

What makes this a great film is the way that it combines the grand scale of the traditional blockbuster war film with the intimacy of its protagonists’ day-to-day experiences.  The film is not concerned with battles between armies of nameless soldiers; instead, it shows how ordinary human beings feel about their predicament – depicting their boredom, frustration, fear and anger –  all compressed into a turbulent two day period.

Although he had only a fraction of the resources available to a Hollywood director on a comparable film, Verneuil manages to construct an astonishingly believable reconstruction of the period.  It is reported that he scoured most of France to find authentic-looking equipment for his film and recruited two thousand extras (mainly dockers and workers at a nearby factory) for the armies of British and French soldiers stranded on the Normandy beaches. 

Henri Decaë’s magnificent cinematography gives the film an epic feel, capturing the grand scale of a lavish war film at the same time as showing us the tiniest details which give it meaning.  This film provides ample evidence for why Decaë is regarded as one of France’s best directors of photography – he seems to have a particular genius for knowing how to draw the maximum impact from a scene, no matter how grand or how banal.   His work on Week-end à Zuydcoote is clearly amongst his finest.

Decaë’s photography is superbly complemented by Maurice Jarre’s music, which alternately contrasts the hope of surviving a terrible war with the terrible reality.  Like so much of this film, the music directly engages the senses and instils in the spectator a deeply emotional experience.

Because the film focuses on individual human experiences, its success depends heavily on a strong cast.  Verneuil is again fortunate here and he is rewarded with some fine acting from such talented artists as Jean-Paul Belmondo, Catherine Spaak, Jean-Pierre Marielle and Pierre Mondy, amongst others.  Belmondo’s performance is particularly noteworthy, showing a depth and range which is rarely seen in the actors glory years of the 1970s and 1980s. 

When it was first released in France, Week-end à Zuydcoote proved to be a great commercial success, attracting just over three million cinema-goers.  It has since fallen into comparative obscurity, which is a pity because it is a captivating film and it really does deserve to be considered as one of the best war films made in France.

© James Travers 2002