"History is violence, all the time."
As cinematic experiments go, Peter Watkins' La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000) is truly impressive. Whether this five-and-a-half hour epic, equal parts historical docudrama and polemic, is entertaining or worthwhile is harder to answer. Ambitious in its conceit and provocative in its themes, it eventually succumbs to rambling self-importance.In March 1871, amidst the disastrous Franco-Prussian War, leftists overthrow the French government and establish the Commune, a socialist government in Paris. The new government tries to revolutionize society, but its extreme politics and radical reforms don't sit well with France's bourgeois society or its premier, Adolphe Thiers. Eventually, the government-in-exile unleashes the French Army on Paris, plunging the City of Lights into class warfare and cyclical brutality.
Revisiting the faux-documentary style of Culloden and Edvard Munch, Watkins uses the conceit of a television broadcasting in 19th Century France. A pompous national television station interviews "experts" to dismiss the Communards as dangerous radicals, irrational feminists and foreign-run, while a rival Communist crew interviews Parisians swept up in the Revolution. If lacking the grunginess of Culloden's interviewees, their conversations and needs are immediate and passionately, if not always articulately argued.
For most of its runtime, La Commune is compelling, with dozens of memorable figures articulating this uprising's issues. A woman's committee battles for space and respect with overworked bureaucrats and sexist male revolutionaries. Workers struggle to grasp the new regime's egalitarian policies, many preferring menial, bourgeois comfort to revolutionary uncertainty. Middle class Frenchmen fret the destruction of property, while pompous politicians declare the Revolutionaries traitors betraying Empire and nation. When the military presses in, the Commune devours itself, summarily executing "disloyal" leaders and turning the city into a war zone.
Yet La Commune gradually abandons immersive reality for Brechtian artifice. A lengthy prologue has the film's stars touring the set and explaining the movie's themes, an awkward introduction that's easily shrugged off. But in the second half, Watkins allows drama and reality to bleed together. Actors dressed in period costume debate globalization, immigration and feminism while intertitles mock media censorship and income disparity. The movie grows more absurd near the climax, where an interviewer chats with Communards manning barricades who slip in and out of character, self-righteously explaining how they'd combat bourgeois society today if given the chance.
It's easy enough to divine Watkins' intentions, pointing up the dialog between history and contemporary politics while commenting on how media skews and manipulates events, past and present, for the System's ends. Unfortunately, these scenes become tedious and didactic. It's not hard for viewers to draw parallels on their own without having Watkins shove them down our throats. Any pretensions of exploding filmic grammar through such bizarre literalism are more intellectual masturbation than cinematic breakthrough.
It's a shame, as La Commune is compelling without the commentary. Given the minimalist settings the historical recreations are quite impression, culminating in the Communards' last stand and the atrocities of reactionary forces. Why Watkins felt he needed to explain its relevance and themes in condescending detail is a mystery known only to him.
