La guerre est finie

Deleuze indicates that Resnais is one of the greatest political film-makers in the West, in modern cinema. According to him, this greatness comes from that they know how to show how people are what is missing, what is not there instead of presence of the people. Also, this film is related to a Spain that will not be seen: do the people in the old central committee stand with the young tereosits or the tired militant?

Resnais really impressed me with this film. He uses real locations and finds subtle atmospheric things that almost never turn up in movies. One sees the way a shadow of a tree moves gently back and forth on the wall as two people relax in bed, the way a gust of wind briefly animates a woman's hair in a subway tunnel.

The movie successfully combines an account of resistance to Franco's Spain from an ex-patriot living in Paris (played by Montand), and his life outside of politics. We see not only his political views, but also how he feels about love and his own situation. Beautiful, brave and innovative, this movie also has some of the most passionate, yet restrained and overall fascinating love scenes that I have seen since Peter Sellers and Shirley Maclaine in 'Being There.'

Yves Montand is a Spaniard in exile in Paris, a Communist working for the central committee in exile in Paris, trying to jump-start the Revolution. He's very professional about what he does. But the Spanish government has arrested agents and he realizes he's grown tired of the never-ending struggle, the insistence of the committee in Paris that their view from a distance gives them better insight than the people who are stationed in Spain. His lover, Ingrid Thulin wants his child, and he indulges in.a tired rant in front of her friends./coworkers tat everything moves and nothing changes.

Montand gives a fine performance as a man growing tired of the always hopeful attitude of the revolutionaries, their insistance on working out the details of life, anxious to snatch small bits of autonomy wherever he can He has grown tired of being a good soldier who sees no end to the war. Will he remain a good soldier? Can he? And what if he cannot?

Alain Resnais movie is far more straightforward than his other works, although he does make liberal use of flashbacks and interpolative stills. With Geneviève Bujold, Jean Dasté, and Michel Piccoli.

"Patience and irony are the chief virtues of a Bolshevik."

Beautifully shot, with splashes of visual flair, like the fast edits or the scenes with the exquisite shimmering of light on the ceiling, an echo of the haze of looking back on a life of an underground struggle against fascism in Spain following the Civil War. The film highlights the need for perseverance, brotherhood, and sacrifice over the long haul to achieve regime change, as well as the melancholy that comes from perceiving that at some point one's own personal "war" may be over, but the movement will continue on in younger hands.

I loved the idea of it, but unfortunately, the story is about as dry as toast, and it takes far too long to get to the most interesting bit, which was the old guard revolutionary (Yves Montand) confronted with newer radicals who disagree with him on tactics. I wish that part had been more developed. There is just too much time spent on mundane aspects beforehand, the details for which were rather muddled, to sustain a two hour film. Even the presence of Geneviève Bujold and Ingrid Thulin couldn't save it from being a dull affair, and how Resnais shot the love scene between Bujold and Montand in such a (nearly comical) artsy way didn't help matters. As an exercise in filmmaking and with these stars, it holds some level of interest, but it's hard to see how anyone could get excited over it. Seeing it once was enough.

This film has aged rather well considering that it's nearly 40 years old, that the concrete political situation(the Franco dictatorship in Spain)it was enmeshed in has disappeared, and that the musical score, the very mannered montage, and the sex scenes are all hopelessly dated and stilted. What gives this film its vitality is the screenplay written by Jorge Semprun, and it resonates today as well as it did in the mid-60s. Semprun had just written his classic, "The Long Voyage", in 1963, and the crisp trenchancy of his narrative style is just as evident in this film as it was in that story of his 1944 voyage to Buchenwald as a captured fighter of the French Resistance. Though we may not feel any longer the need to reassess the strategy of how to overthrow Franco, we still know what it's like to feel you're at the end of the rope with no place to leap to (both politically and psychologically). What Semprun reminds us, both in this film and in "The Long Voyage," is that it's the opportunities to experience solidarity with and support for others over the course of the journey that matters in the end.