Alain Resnais (1966)

The title is ironic.  The protagonist Diego (Yves Montand) is a stalwart of the communist party, commuting between France and Spain to work for the overthrow of the Franco regime, more than a quarter of a century after the end of the Spanish Civil War.  Diego reflects on his motives for continuing with a project so dangerous and, in terms of bringing about political change in Spain, still fruitless.  His recognition of that and his realisation that the appeal of this way of life is largely nostalgic do nothing to weaken its hold on him.  The false names and passports that Diego uses in his line of work have the effect of reinforcing the finally unyielding core of his identity.  Since Alain Resnais’s film was made a decade before Franco’s death and Spain’s subsequent transition to democracy, the material had an intrinsic urgency and poignancy that can’t easily be reproduced for an audience coming to it over thirty years later.  Those qualities certainly don’t emerge from the film as a piece of cinema tout court.   La guerre est finie is often absorbing but thanks more to its meticulous composition (the movement of Sacha Vierny’s camera, the editing by Eric Pluet and Ziva Mostec) than to the themes and the characters which Resnais, working from a screenplay by Jorge Semprún, presents.  What’s on the screen and the soundtrack are parallel experiences:  there’s a disjunction between the fluid images and the spoken word, especially Diego’s mainly explicative voiceover.  (The mixture of dubbing and subtitling – the film is mostly in French with a few exchanges in Spanish – may have contributed to the stiffness of the dialogue and narration.)   The luscious score by Giovanni Fusco, with its obvious Hispanic details, doesn’t seem to fit with what we see and the rest of what we hear.  The music has a trivialising effect.

The progress of the story is occasionally interrupted by what I took to be a mixture of flashbacks and Diego’s anticipation of what lies in store for him (and sometimes the collision of these two mental processes).  Overall, though, the narrative is linear, more so than in other Resnais films made around the same time.  I still found the film fairly hard to follow – or perhaps hard to engage with enough to want to follow.  Although Diego’s weary nobility becomes tedious, Yves Montand has authority and credibility.  His acting looks very simple so that it rarely seems like acting.  He conveys a strong and continuing sense of a self-questioning mind at work.  The two main female characters are Diego’s mistress of several years, Marianne, and Nadine, a young girl whose father’s identity he borrows at one point.  Ingrid Thulin makes Marianne’s attachment to Diego affecting in a physically convincing way, although a few of her reactions come across as over-prepared.  As Nadine, Geneviève Bujold is perhaps too aware of the camera and occasionally overdoes gamine inscrutability but she’s a vivid, striking presence.  The characters of the women are neatly designed to reflect Diego’s conflicting feelings:  Marianne belongs to his longstanding way of life and incarnates the doomed loyalty which that way of life connotes; Nadine, with whom he sleeps only once, reflects the tension between Diego’s yearning for the ardent self-confidence and political enthusiasms of youth and his dislike (maybe envy) of new forms of revolutionary activism.  Yet the conception of all main three characters is so finished that the actors, good as they are, find it hard to bring them fully to life.  Michel Piccoli, as usual, comes through strongly – in a brief appearance as a customs officer, one of the many document-checkers we meet in the course of La guerre est finie.

29 June 2009