Declaration of War Review

The revelations are minor but forceful in Valerie Donzelli's exuberant melodrama Declaration of War, which casts the director as the mother of a two-year-old who is diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor. The father of the child, the literal Romeo to her Juliette, is played by Jeremie Elkaim, Donzelli's co-scripter and the father of their son, Gabriel, whose struggles with terminal illness were the antecedent of the film's narrative core. The personal weight of the story is abundant but as the title infers, Donzelli's film is not an ode to anguished soul-searching in the face of that most blunt notice of mortality.

Faith and its more popular mandates are of little matter in Donzelli and Elkaim's script, as are fiscal worries while coasting through France's universal health care system. This allows Donzelli to investigate the effects of tragedy, and the strengths and stresses of community, family, and partnership under these conditions, with a consistently inventive and yet remarkably clear-eyed and sober stylistic eye. Family and concerned community are of equal weight, indeed almost inseparable, in Romeo and Juliette's life. Few films in recent memory have approached such communities, which includes Romeo's lesbian mother (Brigitte Sy) and her partner, without even a hint of condescension or dull moral scrutiny.

The most fascinating figures in this gathering are Romeo and Juliette themselves, who are not married (neither are Elkaim and Donzelli) and yet share an emotionally rich and well-detailed partnership as the film progresses through a litany of specialists, nurses, diagnosticians, social workers, and surgeons. Donzelli catches the central couple in moments of cathartic partying and self-exploration (or indulgence?) in between hospital visits rather than scenes of repetitive sentimentality that attest to wholly unearned, thrift-store pride and survival of spirit. Indeed, one of the more refreshing things witnessed in Declaration of War is Romeo and Juliette's wanton youth, which is constantly unleashed and consistently humbled by the humanist work being done by the hospital workers and doctors; never is Juliette's maternal instinct held up as somehow more wise or right than the opinions of educated professionals.

 

This tendency towards ambiguity in terms of social habits and sexual preferences puts focus on the inner life of Romeo and Juliette, expressed with audacious style by Donzelli - a musical interlude, a make-out party, a fast-paced dash through the corridors of the hospital, stately narration. Through rushes of house and dubstep, careful, active framing and uniformly strong performers, including Frederic Pierrot, Anne Le Ny, Michelle Moretti and Philippe Laudenbach, Donzelli creates a lively aesthetic environment in which Juliette and Romeo's unique relationship becomes a truly personal matter, as it often is, and not a matter necessarily swayed or distinguished by trauma, social stigmas, or psychological quirks. In fact, the most public issue that Romeo and Juliette are tied to is the health of their child which, in what might seem like a socialist dystopia to some, is here portrayed as an axiom of public good and civility.