Colonel Chabert

Colonel Chabert (Le Colonel Chabert, 1994) is a French drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Yves Angelo from Honoré de Balzac's 1832 novella. Napoleon's cuirassier colonel Chabert was decorated at Eylau, cut down in the charge, buried in a mass grave — and somehow dug himself out. Ten years of hospitals and dosshouses later, he arrives in Paris to reclaim what is his.

Gérard Depardieu plays Chabert as a man worn to nothing: his name is legally dead, his estate absorbed, his wife long remarried to a royalist count. Fabrice Luchini's lawyer Derville takes the case and learns quickly that legal right and practical outcome are rarely the same thing. Fanny Ardant and André Dussollier complete a cast that turns Balzac's bureaucratic nightmare into something genuinely painful. Watch Colonel Chabert (1994) online on iFILM.