Claude Lelouch starts his epic Les
uns et les autres by citing Willa Cather: “There are only two or three
human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had
never happened before.” This initially plays as an acknowledgment of the
universal calamity of war: the film sets up scenarios in France, Germany,
Russia and the US, then plunges them into immediate upheaval, dispatching some
people whom we might have expected to be major characters so rapidly and
cleanly that the impact is almost subliminal. As it travels into the present
day, the film’s narrative keeps gathering speed, often carrying the sense of a
teetering helicopter: transitions from meetings to relationships to break-ups
take mere seconds; fates are sealed in a couple of lines. Intentionally or not
(it’s hard to tell), Cather’s maxim comes to seem not so much like an assertion
of shared experience but as one of existential meaninglessness and stasis, in
which nothing really evolves across generations (underlined by casting several
actors as both mothers/fathers and their daughters/sons, and minimizing the use
of aging make-up) or borders or transitions, and in which the national and
social distinctions of the earlier sequences fuzzily converge. The redemption,
it seems, lies in music: the movie overflows with performance – spanning dance
and orchestral and pop videos and jazz bands, played to large crowds and empty
halls, before cameras and in rehearsal rooms – culminating in a final extended
showpiece that brings together most or all (it’s hard to keep track) of the
surviving characters either as performers or as spectators (the notion of
sublimation into spectacle is one of several respects in which the film brings
Scorsese’s New York New York to mind, although the comparison only
underlines the recurring passionless of Lelouch’s creation). The film has no
shortage of diversions then, and the ambition is almost hypnotic, but the
further it pushes toward greatness, the smaller and emptier it ultimately
feels.
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