"The beauty of the world " :what a strange title for movie which deals with the return of a legionnaire, who fought in Mali and who saw his army mates die in an explosion ; only the final pictures can justify a screenplay in which the hero waged war in a country laid waste .
The first part depicts the soldier coming from war, and suffering from the army post -traumatic stress disorder (PTSD);without using a single flashback ,Miss Carron makes us feel his agony,his paranoia and his terror : if he gets stuck in his car , in a traffic jam , he thinks he has fallen into an ambush.....Unlike one of his former mates,whose wife walked out on him, he's got a loving one and a cute kid ; but ever since the fete who celebrates 'the soldier has come home " joy , the first cracks in the mirror appear ; soon he can't relate to his wife who tries her best to help him adjust to civilian life and becomes violent ; leaving his house , his behavior becomes more and more terrifying :stark naked in the snow, he calls out the names of his departed friends .
Although he was totally helpless,he feels responsible for their death ,and awfully guilty .The wife's friend was right when she told her that the army can and must help him.
That's also what his black mate,a patient with whom he shares his room in the hospital, says: "we protect people, we ensure their security, so that they can lead a normal life and what about us? Who takes care of us , who cares if our psyche is shot; they make us do the dirty work, then they leave us to our own devices.
But,as the final lines read , since the first years of the millenium ,the army PTSD is considered a desease which can and must be treated ,and the second part of the movie is given over to the treatment :interviews with the psychiatrist,and group therapy : Miss Carron has a tendency to use a lot of talky scenes and interminable scenes of cinema verité, close to documentary ; but if she failed in "le fils d'un roi" (the endless conversation between teachers) because she was juggling too many things at once, in "la beauté du monde" ,she is convincing because she concentrates on one subject: by sharing their past and the tragedies they experimented ,these men and women can come to terms with them ; one of the patients is not even a military man, but his son was killed in the horrors of the Bataclan massacre and his presence is thoroughly relevant.
It's not for all tastes, but Miss Carron ,one more time,takes the French cinema off the beaten track ; she adapts Wyler's masterful "best years of our lives "(1945) to the hard realities of the twenty-first century.
