Uranus

A French film set just after the war. The year is 1945. A small town has come out of a bombardment; half the buildings are in ruins and people are living in other people's houses. A new order is being set up. Whatever anyone did during the occupation is being called to account; the communists are strong in the town hall, resistance fighters are heroes, and anyone marked as a collaborator is in danger. Several people are at the centre. A café owner, a schoolteacher who keeps out of things, a man in hiding, and a large labourer who is taken with poetry. From there the film is about a town settling accounts with itself. Denunciations, old grudges, the sharing out of property, and the writing down afterwards of who was on which side. What the narrative is interested in is not heroism but honesty: it draws neither the resistance nor the purge in one dimension and says that in those days everyone invented a little. The long scenes in the café are the best thing in it; the talk is hard, mocking and written in the language of the period. The source is a novel by Marcel Aymé. Gérard Depardieu, Michel Blanc, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Philippe Noiret and Michel Galabru are in the cast; the best-known French actors of the time together. Claude Berri directed. On release it caused argument in France; some found its view of the postwar purge too even-handed. Who it is for: anyone who likes French period films and political drama with a crowded cast. Who it is not for: anyone who does not know the period; the narrative explains no background and the names go by fast.