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Released in cinemas in January 2023, Win or Die is broadcast for the first time unencrypted on French television, this Wednesday evening on C8. First had not been kind to this historical film adapted from the Puy du Fou show The Last Panache during his appearance in the cinema. Our review:
Win or Die chooses his side from the start. The film opens with an astonishing sequence: a montage of writers and historians, filmed in the chiaroscuro of a beautiful library, introducing the subject – the Vendée wars – like an episode of History Secrets. Among the speakers, a certain Reynald Secher, who concludes this intro by whispering over a fade to black the word which according to him best sums up this atrocious conflict: “honor… honor…”. Besides the undoubtedly involuntary (but quite funny) echo with Kurtz's last words in In the heart of darkness and obviously Apocalypse Now (“the horror…the horror”), the sequence immediately shows which side is located Win or Die. Secher being one of the supporters of the theory of the “Vendean genocide” putting the guerrillas of 1793 and the Jews exterminated by the Nazis on the same level (a whole program), the film thus aims to be much more than a simple historical entertainment great show. Win or Die wants to be a history lesson. But it's missed, whether in terms of the big show or the lesson.
The idea is to tell the heroic destiny of Charette, a courageous Vendée captain facing the terrible revolutionaries who came to depopulate the country and recruit soldiers to wage war against the kings of Europe. Refusing at first to fight, Charette will become a flamboyant leader of men embodying until death, alone against everyone, a certain idea of heroism – this is the strong idea of the film, very classic since we did tons of stuff with it, Braveheart has The Patriot passing through 300 or even Vercingetorix with Christophe Lambert: the national hero, alone against everyone (or in any case “not very numerous against the horde”) but invaded by a superior power, tries to resist through armed struggle. Win or Die fails to conceal its lack of means: everything seems to have been filmed in the same corner of the Vendée countryside, systematically using voice-over (that of Hugo Becker, who plays Charette and took the tone of Christian Bale in Batman Begins for the occasion) to tell everything that we don't see on screen due to lack of budget.
In the 1950s, Dalton Trumbo wanted to erase the battles from his initial script of Spartacus by resorting to the ellipse, but he had found a sublime way of evoking them by showing, for example, the floods of blood of the victims carried by the water of a river (although the finished film still includes battles). No similar idea in Win or Die : we are spared the first pitched battle by a simple dissolve on the dead accompanied by a pithy voice-over commentary (“We lost…”), and the strongest cinematic idea of the film consists of showing the hero, bearded and haggard, in a dark otherworld where he twirls his saber in the void to the rhythm of a hyper montage cutbefore seeing a white horse pass in slow motion. The rest includes a lot of very serious chatter, and again a lot of voiceover to tell the rest. Not much, then.
We wonder, in the next issue of Première, what is the point of this attempt to resurrect French heroes in the cinema, with the releases of a new Asterixof the Three musketeers and of Win or Die. In the latter case, it is quite simple since it is the cinema adaptation of a show from Puy du fou, imagined – like all the others – by Philippe de Villiers. It's difficult to separate the film from its context when it is co-directed by an author of Secrets d'histoire (well), distributed by the specialist in “Christian-inspired films” Saje Distribution, which was responsible for showing in France the violently anti-abortion film Unplannedand that its producer, Nicolas de Villiers, clearly affirms in the press kit the profession of faith of Win or Die : “we celebrate French greatness and highlight heroes who make us better and make us want to imitate them because man is made to admire. This is the heart of our approach: celebrating the bright part of our history, put it at the service of a great spectacle, family cinema, with an international scope, which is vibrant and brings people together.” But as no cinema arises from its glaring lack of means, Win or Die can only count on its morality – its ideology? -, trying to pass, like its hero, for a film “alone against all” full of panache in the face of the barbaric hordes of invaders.
A funny history lesson, and a vision of cinema already seen a thousand times, in a film where the dramatic mechanisms closely resemble those of Chouans! by Philippe de Broca (the wild republican recruitment which provokes the revolt: been there, done that). Difficult to find a sense of cinema, a luminous part in this gray and dull film (the oversaturated photo like We must save Private Ryan), which does not manage to overcome its reactionary ideology to make it beautiful cinema with a grand spectacle, heroic and mythological.
It is perhaps interesting to compare the film's vision of the mystique of resistance and heroism to that ofAndorbut yes: while the heroes of Win or Die are necessarily grandiose, overtaken by destiny and doomed to sacrifice (but not to suicide, be careful! Suicide is a sin and has no place in such a Catholic film), the heroes of the astonishing Star Wars series remain tormented by fear, indecision and submission. If they become heroes, it is by choice, faced with circumstances, they are attempts of heroes and it is much stronger – in any case much more current, luminous and unifying than this Win or Die convinced of his strength, which will definitely only convince those acquired to his cause.
Its fanatics, in a way, and according to John le Carré fanatics always hide a secret doubt. In this fake great film that is too sure of itself, there is no room for any secret doubt, the one that deep down makes us vibrate and cry in the face of the fate of William Wallace in Braveheartto give a random example. It is true that Mel Gibson, if he deep down nourished his historical frescoes with his hardcore Catholicism, was above all guided by a sense of equally hardcore cinema. It’s no secret (of history) to anyone. And too bad for “French grandeur”.