Interview de Pierre Schoendoffer concernant DIEN BIEN PHU-642
Dien Bien Phu is a defeat. The most important French military defeat overseas since Montcalm lost Quebec in 1759. I have no taste for defeats. I am all too familiar with the feelings of shame, humiliation, bitterness, despair and also cowardly relief that accompany them. That wasn’t my idea in making this film, believe me. No, Dien Bien Phu is something else. Dien Bien Phu is the fateful moment marking the end of an era, the desperate farewell to a period, to a certain long-gone idea of the greatness of France, of her role and place in the world, to the inheritance of the 18th and 19th centuries, to a certain dream of France. There too, my aim isn’t to judge this past. I’m simply an observer. Dien Bien Phu was the last battle fought by France with soldiers from her dying colonial empire. For the last time, North Africans, Africans (known as Senegalese at the time), men from all the West Indian, Indian Ocean and Pacific islands and the Indochinese would fight and die alongside French soldiers and Europeans from the Foreign Legion. Even more surprisingly, these men had the confused feeling that this was the last battle and that it would be lost. There’s a mystery there! And there’s another mystery: why did all these men fight in the depths of a valley lost in a far-flung corner of the world, on the soil of Vietnam, an independent country that was no longer a French possession, with the same tenacity and sprit of sacrifice as their grandfathers at Verdun, on French soil? Yes, it’s a great mystery! Thanks to all these young men, the Indochina war had a noble death. The reasoning side of my brain cannot understand that. The emotional side of my brain can perceive a meaning in it as one can perceive a meaning in Beethoven’s great symphonies. My film, Dien Bien Phu, wants to be like a symphony.
You shot the film in Vietnam. Was that easy for you ?
At first, I was a little reticent about shooting in Vietnam for reasons that you can imagine. In 1989, when the Vietnamese gave Jacques Kirsner, my producer, permission to shoot the film in North Vietnam, I felt that it was a hand that they were holding out to us, 35 years after the heartbreaking farewell of the battle. And I decided to take that hand and shake it. That’s probably one of the best things that I have ever done in my life. I love Vietnam, particularly the North, Tonkin as we called it back then. It’s the country where I became a man, the land of my second birth if I can put it that way. I’m from Tonkin, just as I am from Alsace. I love the land on a gut level, with its monsoon clouds, rain and sun, wind, scents, rice paddies and jungle. I love the serious and laughing people of Tonkin who have such a rich and intense inner life. I feel at home there. I’m making no claims but I look on it as home. When I arrived there, I told them, "Your land has received my sweat, my tears, my blood, and I discovered love here. I feel that I’m home!" They understood what I meant. The fact that I agreed to shoot the film in Vietnam with the Vietnamese suddenly lent additional seriousness to our project. I needed to sort things out with them. I told them, "If I make this film here, with you, I don’t want to revive old feelings of resentment and bitterness. I want to turn the page of a mutual and painful past with you and make a contribution to renewed friendly relations." Shooting the film there, in Tonkin, I was continually aware of having three missions to carry out. First, to make a spectacular movie, an entertainment as Pascal described it. That was my professional responsibility, my job and my first concern. Secondly, to pay tribute to my comrades who fell in this battle, to all those men who helped forge my personality and convictions. I had to pay them back for what I had received from them. I am a survivor and, as such, I have a debt to pay. And finally, last but certainly not least, I immediately sensed that I had a duty of hope in relation to the Vietnamese. I had to show what I believe to be the truth but at the same time I couldn’t insult the future. So, as you see, shooting this film was a love affair. Strangely, I also think that the battle was a love affair. Working with the Vietnamese, my former enemies, was an overwhelming experience both for them and for me. It was one of the noblest human undertakings that I have had the privilege to experience. The Vietnamese, the Vietminh and the French, hand in hand, re-enacting this battle together was a unique, exceptional and historical event in my eyes. That’s all to the honour of our two countries. One evening, on May 7, 1991, the head of the Vietnamese film board (a former cameraman at Dien Bien Phu on the Vietminh side) took my arm and said, "I wonder what the men who are still there, the dead, my comrades and yours, feel about what we’re doing today." After a brief moment of silence, he added, "I think that they must be happy." That man spoke the truth. I believe, I think and I hope that he spoke the truth. That evening, May 7, 1991, the anniversary of the fall of Dien Bien Phu, on our reconstructed battlefield, I had the feeling that he had spoken the truth. I shall shortly be returning to Hanoi with the film to screen it there as I had promised. I’m thinking of the last words of La Hire, Joan of Arc’s comrade in arms, to his confessor, "I’ve done everything that a soldier is used to doing. As for the rest, I did what I could." I’ll tell the Vietnamese friends who worked with me, "I’ve done everything that a filmmaker is used to doing. As for the rest, I did what I could."
Is your film a historical evocation ?
Yes. And no! It’s a fresco, a saga. The destiny of a crowd of people who receive and carry out orders, who revolt, who surpass themselves, who suffer and who laugh. Many of them die, others survive. As I said earlier, it’s a symphony, it isn’t a didactic study of politics, strategy and tactics. I have tried to get across the very essence of Dien Bien Phu. Once the screenplay had been written, just before shooting, we recorded the music. Georges Delerue has composed a magnificent and premonitory concerto "Le Concerto de l’Adieu", perfectly suited to the subject at the film’s heart. A concerto is a dialogue between an instrument and an orchestra. In the film, the instrument, a first violin, played by a woman (Ludmila Mikael) is the voice of France and the Hanoi orchestra is the voice of Vietnam. Delerue’s noble, rigorous and emotionally restrained score is part of a much wider concerto and converses with the terrible percussion of the sound and fury of war. I know that the film’s soundtrack is exceptional and unequalled. All the sounds were reconstituted and rearranged to form this visual and aural symphony that marks the film’s finality. The music suggests the unspeakable. It addresses man’s emotional and mysterious side.