13and stoop down to reload; alliances form
and disband; heads disappear in explo-
sions of snow. Brave fi ghters suddenly fall.
If you watch the snowball fi ght over
and over, as I will do for the rest of my
life, certain characters begin to stand out.
Down in the bottom-left corner, a thick
man with a strong black mustache fi res a
cheap shot: a wild fastball, from point-
blank range, that barely misses its intend-
ed target, a slim man who is busy looking
the other way. The slim man turns, cocks
his left arm and wallops the big man on
his thigh. From that point forward, these
two are locked in savage, jolly combat.
They reload and pelt each other multi-
ple times, until fi nally — overtaken, per-
haps, by the homosocial energy crackling
between them — the big man staggers
forward and lunges to tackle the slim
man like a bear attacking a deer. But once
again he misses: The slim man sidesteps
and, grinning, shoves the big man into
the snow. The big man pops back up, like
a mustachioed snow-zombie, and starts
pelting the slim man again from behind.
My favorite character, and the closest
the fi lm has to a protagonist, is a man
in a bowler hat and a coat so long it
fl aps around his legs like the cloak of alevitating wizard. He looks as if he has
just stepped out of a bank meeting, and
yet he abandons himself to this childish
street warfare with eager glee. While the
other fi ghters stand more or less rooted
in place, the man in the bowler covers a
surprising amount of ground — he is a
free agent, prancing around with lum-
bering lightness, entering and exiting
clusters of people, galloping across the
road, following his bliss, attacking wil-
ly-nilly with a funky sidearm toss. He
seems to take as many shots as he gives,
and by the end of the fi lm his black coat
is thoroughly dusted with white; you canThe video in
@JoaquimCampa’s
original viral tweet
of the colorized
French snowball fight
has 8.5 million views.