Au revoir là-haut (See you up there in the english version) is a 2017 French drama film written, directed and starred by Albert Dupontel, adapted from the novel The Great Swindle (Au revoir là-haut in French) by Pierre Lemaitre. The film mixes high craft, surrealist humor and extremely dark themes of trauma, death, corruption and manipulation, in ways that hold together rather well. In November 1918, a few days before the Armistice, Edouard Péricourt saves Albert Maillard’s life. The two men have nothing in common but the war. Lieutenant Pradelle, by ordering a senseless assault, destroys their lives while binding them as companions in misfortune. On the ruins of the carnage of WWI, condemned to live, the two attempt to survive. Thus, as Pradelle is about to make a fortune with the war victims’ corpses, Albert and Edouard mount a monumental scam with the bereaved families’ commemoration and with a nation’s hero worship.
