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In the opening days of the First World War, French officer Adrien (Caravaca) is wounded when a German shell explodes in his face. Half dead from shock and horrifically injured, he's stretchered off the front line without having fired a single shot.
For both Adrien and director François Dupeyron, the First World War effectively ends there, since "The Officers' Ward" isn't interested in the battlefield, but in the story of Adrien's five-year regeneration and recuperation.
In a masterstroke of tension, Dupeyron makes sure that for 35 minutes after his injury, we don't get to see Adrien's face. Unable to speak and too weak to move, Adrien lies silently, bleeding. It's a private hell that Dupeyron captures through point of view shots from Adrien's perspective, combined with several shots of his blood-soaked body, but not his face. All of which is made even more harrowing by the sound of Adrien's rasping, blood-soaked breathing and the horrified faces of those who come to tend his wounds.
Once the bandages come off, though, Dupeyron is a little less assured. Adrien's lengthy rehabilitation, as he learns to accept his changed countenance and how to speak again, is effective but a little too familiar to be quite as emotionally charged as the opening sequences.
Fortunately, Tetsuo Nagata's masterful cinematography takes up the slack - his choice of lighting gives the film's visuals a consistently yellow tinge, suggesting both the mustard gas of the trenches and, more damningly, the jaundiced nature of a world at war with itself.
Haunting and emotive viewing, "The Officers' Ward" brilliantly captures the insanity of a time when science had perfected mechanized warfare, but had yet to work out how to rebuild the ripped and shredded bodies of the men sent out to fight.
