An average movie

To be honest, I had no idea what to expect from this flick but since there was a very nice cast involved, I thought I might as well check it out. Basically, it turned out to be some kind of French version of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ which wasn’t necessarily a bad idea. However, even if it was clearly an ambitious project (it was in the fact the most expensive French movie ever made at the time), I’m afraid the damned thing never really worked though. Indeed, in ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, all the issues of imperialism and white saviour tropes were mostly compensated by some impressive epic directing by David Lean but Alain Corneau definitely didn’t play in the same league, I’m afraid. Indeed, even if the damned thing did last 3 hours, there was nothing much really epic about it. There was also the issue that, even though it was made 40 years ago, it still probably already felt outdated when it was released in the 80’s. Concerning the cast, even though the actors involved were really interesting (Gérard Depardieu, Philippe Noiret, Catherine Deneuve, Sophie Marceau), they were all rather weak. Indeed, Depardieu played Saganne as some kind of gentle empty giant but it was probably not the best approach as he never managed to make the guy really fascinating. Concerning Deneuve and Marceau, even though they were both really charismatic, they were actually also rather underwhelming but, at least, they had the excuse that their respective characters were really poorly developed. Eventually, the only one who managed to do something interesting with his character was Philippe Noiret. Indeed, he managed to find an interesting balance between displaying this veteran soldier as a competent experienced man but also as being arrogant, vain and probably missing the point about what was actually going in the Sahara back in those days. Anyway, to conclude, I think I was actually probably too generous with my rating here but I guess the damned thing might still be worth a look though.