by Derek Smith 3/06/05

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The opening shot of Bitter Victory, a long take where room full of attack dummies hang motionless from the ceiling, evokes the feelings of the dehumanization that come from war and establishes the strange tone which is held throughout the film.  In an early scene, a soldier jokingly imitates a battle with hand motions and realistic sound effects and later an officer plays with a toy airplane.  There is a sense that while the men here are well-versed in the theories of war, they are clueless about the realities of combat.  From the beginning, it is established that Leith, a smarmy intellectual who likes nothing more than to be proven right, and Brand, a cowardly major who wishes his role in the war is to remain behind a desk, are on unfriendly terms.  When Brand discovers that Leith had a torrid love affair with his wife some years ago, his childlike, jealous behavior gives Leith a perverse pleasure which he later tries to exploit.  What at outwardly appears to be a simple love triangle is actually a way for Ray to develop his characters psychological deficiencies and how they respond to and play off of one another.

The friction between the two men creates a ever-growing divide between the goals of the mission and the petty behavior of the soldiers.  At the beginning of their commando mission to retrieve secret documents from the Nazi's, Leith steps in to kill a guard after Brand hesitates out of fear.  It was an instinctive act of desperation and survival, but is held over Brand through the rest of the film to suppress his masculinity and call his bravery into question.  Their relationship from this point on has each playing their role in attempts to justify their manhood while considering each other polar opposites when they are merely different sides of the same coin.  Both men are weak at heart, seeking power and the respect of their men to justify their frivolous existence and as both are fraud's, there is a subconscious, animalistic desire to eliminate the other.  In a pathetic attempt to take advantage of his authority, Brand leaves Leith behind with the men wounded in their first battle and moves forward with the rest of the soldiers.  The injured men are clearly in pain and ready to die, but after killing the German, Leith is unable to muster up the courage to kill his comrade.  Rather than quickly putting him out of his misery or attempting to save his life in conventional manner, he picks up the mortally wounded man and carries him on his soldiers.  Maurice Leroux's unconventional score comes bursting to the forefront suggesting an act of true chivalry only to be undermined by the man's agonizing screams, "You coward!  Put me down, you're hurting me!".  It is an eerie scene that sums up the films views on the role of masculinity and macho posturing in modern warfare, suggesting that it is often the cause of wars and the driving force behind the men who fight them.  Although most of the characters fail to see the similarities between Leith and Brand - one a coward both inside and out, the other bold and arrogant in appearance, but weak and frail at heart - Ray creates a visual pallet where the men's individuality disappears beneath the wind and sand of the oppressive desert, culminating in their wrestling match in the sandstorm where the two are virtually indistinguishable.  Only once the mission is over do they escape one another, but their journey has left them both as lifeless and insignificant as the attack dummies in the film's final shot.