Fully understanding the war—who does?—may not be necessary in appreciating the disturbing, moving and sometimes too-beautiful production. But that production certainly puts a Teutonic tweak on history, sometimes to outrageous effect. Can a concrete room filled with the corpses of innocent young German recruits—who have all just been gassed—suggest anything other than the death camps of World War II? These sequences sanctify the historical position that the onerous terms of the treaty are what led to Hitler and the Holocaust. Just for good measure, one of the concluding murders in the film is committed by a French farm boy, avenging a theft of duck eggs by two starving German soldiers.

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