Already addressed in Rachid Bouchareb’s stirring Days of Glory from 2006, the overlooked wartime contributions of France’s African troops get another airing in this new drama. This time, the film deals with the Senegalese corps rather than Maghrebi, and the industry has moved on enough to have a bona fide superstar of that heritage toplining, in the shape of Omar Sy. On its French release, Sy was hung out to dry in the press for suggesting that the west paid disproportionate attention to conflicts close to home, such as the war in Ukraine, rather than ones in the global south. How this timid and ineffectually dramatised film could have used some of that edge.
Sy plays Bakary, a Fula herdsman who is press-ganged into France’s military ranks during the first world war along with his son Thierno (Alassane Diong). Terrified for his kid, he quickly begins looking for an out, trying to secure him a job in the mess safely away from the front. But Thierno scuppers the plan by getting in the good graces of Lieutenant Chambreau (Jonas Bloquet), who promotes him. Atypically non-racist and egalitarian, Chambreau is nevertheless still to be mistrusted because of his suicidal fixation on taking a nearby hill in order to impress his general father.
Director Mathieu Vadepied, previously art director on Sy’s smash hit Intouchables, gets a pass for the obligatory trench-storming centrepiece scene. But there is a fatally hesitant quality to the storytelling here, with little sense of who – beyond being father and son – Bakary and Thierno are as individuals and how they feel about their enforced ordeal. It also feels geographically vague, with a north African fennec fox inexplicably present at one point in what is supposed to be mainland France, while the normally irrepressible Sy is stranded in an oddly distracted limbo. (The headstrong Diong, licensed by the army to defy his father’s authority, does better.)
Even more strangely, for most of the film there is only brief and muted expression of the outrage over colonial exploitation. When Vadepied does finally broach the question of why black soldiers’ sacrifices for la patrie have been obscured, it’s in a sideways and almost deferential manner that feels out of step with the very serious questioning of France’s colonial legacy taking place in the real world. This feels like a missed opportunity.
• Father and Soldier is released on 6 October at Ciné Lumière, London
