Joyeux Noel - Merry Christmas

On this special day in the year, i.e. Christma Eve, I would like to share with you the film I have just watched on BBC.

Some critical observation:

Stephen Holden, film critic for The New York Times, liked the motion picture and called it a "visually sweeping film," and believed the drama's anti-war sentiments were high-minded. He wrote, "If the film's sentiments

about the madness of war are impeccably high-minded, why then does Joyeux Noël ...feel as squishy and vague as a handsome greeting card declaring peace on earth? Maybe it's because the kind of wars being fought in the 21st century involve religious, ideological and economic differences that go much deeper and feel more resistant to resolution than the European territorial disputes and power struggles that precipitated World War I... Another reason is that the movie's cross-section of soldiers from France, Scotland and Germany are so scrupulously depicted as equal-opportunity peacemakers that they never come fully to life as individuals."

Critic Roger Ebert also wrote about the sentimentality of the film, "Joyeux Noël has its share of bloodshed, especially in a deadly early charge, but the movie is about a respite from carnage, and it lacks the brutal details of films like Paths of Glory ...Its sentimentality is muted by the thought that this moment of peace actually did take place, among men who were punished for it, and who mostly died soon enough afterward.

But on one Christmas, they were able to express what has been called, perhaps too optimistically, the brotherhood of man."