Please note, this is a question about actual France, so I believe this goes here and not in Cafe Society.
Also please note, there are SPOILERS below.
In the last third of the movie, Corporal Schofield jumps into a river to escape pursuit. It’s a swift-moving river with large stones in it and steep stony banks, seemingly impossible to climb. Schofield is swept over a waterfall–hard to tell in the movie but looks perhaps 50 ft in height.
Are there such rivers in NE France? I would have thought they’d be more placid, with dirt banks, and no waterfalls at all. The river runs through a town called Écoust-Saint-Mein; I’m not going to “gotcha!” the movie if there’s no such river in the town, but I am curious to know if the river as seen in the film is at all representative of the local geography.
The movie was set between Paris and the Belgian border, which seems conspicuously unspotted in the map but as we all know absence of evidence does not equal evidence of no waterfalls.
I don’t see anything near Écoust-Saint-Mein. The village itself has a tiny water ditch running through it. The nearest large body of water to the north is the Sensée Canal, which is a wide placid river.
I haven’t seen the movie, but I like waterfalls and mucking around with maps, so I thought I’d have a go …
OpenStreetMap shows height contours when you switch to bicycle map, which should give some indication for the likelihood of steep banks and waterfalls.
There’s 50m difference in elevation between the bold contours, 10m between the faint ones (and yes, it is m for both). Definitely looks like they shot the scene a much hillier place than where it supposedly happened.
The nearby La scarpe river has locks every couple of kms so no waterfalls, but in wartime and close to the frontline they could have been destroyed by shelling, I guess.
I suppose, if you’re under fire and every other sort of pressure, crossing a weir or a cascade of water from a damaged lock might feel like a much taller waterfall especially if it sweeps you away.
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day
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Now that the question has been answered, I offer a similar, though perhaps more egregious, example: the much higher waterfall and rushing river in a sorry of canyon in The Fugitive, supposedly in Illinois but clearly not (and filmed out in Idaho or thereabouts).
