How a German war movie disarmed Oscar voters despite woes at home

When "All Quiet on the Western Front" first aired in September, there was no indication that it was about to wage an all-out campaign for votes in the Oscars.

The German English-language WWI film comes from Netflix, which had a slate of much more expensive "prestige" movies prepped for the Oscars, from Oscar-winning director Alejandro Gonzalez's "Bardo" Arrived at the star-studded film "Glass Onion: A Knives". Out of Mystery.

But while those have largely been dropped, with one nomination apiece, 'All Quiet' has emerged from the crowded trenches of awards season hopefuls as an Oscar favorite, with nine nods including for the coveted Best Picture honors.

"It's really like a wave of joy and luck that washes over us," director Edward Berger told AFP, a few days before his film won seven awards at the British BAFTAs, including best movie.

"We really appreciate it...it's a German war movie!"

Indeed, Berger's film is the third screen adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's seminal novel about naïve young German soldiers facing the horrors of war - but the first shot in the German native language. author.

If asked, the director "would have immediately said no" to another English version.

Fortunately, the decision to reverse the script was aided by Netflix's hugely successful expansion into new global markets with recent subtitled hits such as the South Korean series "Squid Game" and the Oscar-winning film "Roma".

The film's eventual price tag of $20 million was a relatively small change for the streaming giant, but a huge sum in the German film industry.

"We wouldn't have gotten the kind of budget you need to make this movie five years ago," Berger said.

The Best Picture Oscar nomination is the first for a German-language film.

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Ironically, the film was much better received outside the German-speaking world than it was at home, where many critics trashed it.

In particular, critics criticized Berger's decision to depart from Remarque's text, which, with 50 million copies sold worldwide and a legacy of being banned by the Nazis, holds today a sacred status in Germany.

Unlike the novel, the film depicts tense armistice peace talks with French generals. It also omits a section in which one of its war-hardened heroes goes home but cannot readjust to civilian life.

"I don't follow that very closely...it's part of the journalist's job - to observe, to criticize," shrugged.

"I felt empowered to make these changes" because "why do the same?" he added.

To sum up the "physical difference" between the film's reception at home and abroad, Berger pointed to a particularly heartbreaking scene near the end of the film.

A key character is fatally bayoneted in the back - a moment Berger intended to be harrowing and brutal, but not necessarily unexpected, given the novel's fame and the unfathomable death toll of the war.

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Yet at the film's world premiere in Toronto last year, "there was a big hiccup in the audience," he recalls.

"I was so surprised, because I hadn't expected this... In Germany, it didn't happen," Berger said.

"As Germans, we expect that in a German war movie you can't have heroes. You can't have people who are successful in the mission. You can't almost not make a soldier survive,” he said.

In contrast, "In America, you're used to the hero. You want them to come out positively, and you cling to the hope that your hero will change the world."

- 'Shame and responsibility and guilt' -

In any case, Berger did not join out of a sense of patriotic duty. Both the film and the original anti-war novel are fiercely opposed to chauvinism of all stripes.

"We wanted to make a very German film, but we're not doing it for the country," he said.

"I'm not a patriot. Germans have a difficult relationship with patriotism, pride or honor, about their history or their country. So I'm not in that business."

Instead, filming in German offered "an outward stamp of authenticity" and a deeper sense of the "shame, responsibility and guilt" that many Germans feel about the story, said Shepherd.

Whatever happens at the Academy Awards on March 12, "All Quiet" clearly left an indelible impact on voters at the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

It's considered a shoo-in for Best International Feature Film statuette, a strong possibility for Best Picture, and its nine Oscar nominations are one shy of the all-time record for a language film. foreign.

"Were we surprised? Sure," Berger said. "I mean, you can't rely on something like that."

AFP

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