Diên Biên Phù

Three decades after the filming of The 317th Platoon, Pierre Schoendoerffer returns to familiar terrain: Diên Biên Phù is an ambitious semi-autobiographical war film that captures the scale and the suffering of the First Indochina War.

Vietnam, 1954: The end of the First Indochina War is drawing near, and in the fifty-seven-day battle from which the film takes its name, the confrontation between French troops and Viet Minh revolutionaries reaches its dramatic and bloody conclusion. Meanwhile, in the country's capital, Hanoi, British-American reporter Howard Simpson (Donald Pleasence) pieces together the patchwork reports of events as they unfold.

English actor Donald Pleasence here (Halloween, The Great Escape...) takes an admirable step out of his linguistic comfort zone portraying French-speaking journalist and writer Simpson.
Yet Diên Biên Phù is far more than a mere vehicle for its star. No individual takes centre stage. This is a film about endless battle, about acts of bravery and cowardice, about the loss of the self in the smoke of the battlefield. A veteran of the battle itself, Schoendoerffer captures perfectly both the dehumanising scale of the violence and its very human consequences.

While American cinema may boast a bursting back-catalogue of Vietnam-era movies (Apocalypse Now, Platoon, The Deer Hunter), there remain just a handful of French films set in the First Indochina War.  Schoendoerffer himself describes it as an "epic docudrama", much in the style of Japanese Pearl Harbour film Tora! Tora! Tora!.

Nominated for ‘Best Music Written for a Film' at the 1993 Césars, Diên Biên Phù's original score from Georges Delerue (Platoon, Le Mépris...) proves a powerfully evocative backdrop for the action. The orchestral performances will take your breath away.

This is the work of a more mature, polished director. Schoendoerffer is at the top of his game.