The emotional punches just keep on coming with this festive euro pudding, a sweet chocolate-box representation of the first World War. Duck if you’re jaded. Look at the young men from the sleepy Scottish village giddily heading off to the trenches. Watch how the Germans, French and Scottish soldiers suffer equally on the frontlines. Guillaume Canet has no news of his family from occupied territory. Alex Ferns goes a bit loopy when his brother is killed. Daniel Bruhl, both jittery and fiercesome as a Jewish German officer, pines for his French wife.
On Christmas Eve however, the harmonious lure of the bagpipes proves too strong and the various factions all cross into no man’s land for football, carolling and a bizarre visit by Diane Kruger’s opera singer (dear, oh dear, she can’t even lip-synch).
The drama, such as it is, never quite gets around to surprising us, or providing anything you won’t find in the Paul McCartney video. There’s a mention of headlice, troubles with predictably barmy superiors (the German guy even has a twitch) and the potentially fascinating dilemma of returning to the trenches after the party, but Merry Christmas is primarily concerned with printing-the-myth of the unofficial Christmas truces of 1914. That’s okay though. The events do allow for a legitimate PG version in a way that the events which inspired Life Is Beautiful do not, and it's undeniably cute.
Expect it to pop up on continental TV stations every December until the apocalypse.