The films of Alain Resnais are often among the most intellectual and difficult that art film lovers encounter, but La Guerre est Finie (1966) has an appeal that is somewhat more visceral. What I find most appealing about this film is not its structural complexity, but the intensity of the mood and mystique that it creates. This film is a passionate story of an aging revolutionary that is more psychological thriller than action film.

Historical Background: Alain Resnais was one of the most exciting of the auteurs that emerged as part of the French New Wave at the end of the 1960’s. His film experience prior to the New Wave era had been limited to shorts and documentaries, though of distinctly noteworthy caliber. His 1948 documentary Van Gogh won an Academy Award and his profoundly moving documentary Night and Fog (1955) about the Nazi concentration camps sometimes even appears on lists of the Top-100 foreign films all-time. Resnais’ first feature film, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), was one of the seminal New Wave films, together with works by Chabrol, Truffaut, Rohmer, and Godard. Resnais followed with two increasingly complex and difficult films: Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Muriel (1963). That led to La Guerre est Finie (1966) and then on to a brilliant career highlighted by such notable films as Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime (1968), Stavisky (1974), Providence (1977), Mon Oncle d’Amerique (1980), Life is a Bed of Roses (1983), and Melo (1986) (which I am dying to see, but which seems to be out-of-print in America and rarely if ever listed at auction sites).

For La Guerre est Finie, Resnais teamed once again with talented cinematographer Sacha Vierny, with whom he had generated Last Year at Marienbad. Equally important to the project was the collaboration with script writer Jorge Semprún, the man who had written the Oscar winning political triller Z (1969), directed by Constantin Costa-Gavras. The collaboration proved so successful, in fact, that Resnais turned to Semprún again later for Stavisky. The American Academy was so impressed with Semprún’s script for La Guerre est Finie that he was awarded with an Oscar nomination, but the brilliance of the film is as much due to Resnais’ direction as the script. Semprún, a Spanish novelist and survivor of a concentration camp, was also a leftist resistance fighter in exile from Franco Spain, so one has to imagine that the subject matter of La Guerre est Finie was something felt personally and keenly by the author.

The Story: Diego Mora (Yves Montand) is a middle-aged Spanish national and Communist traveling under the alias of Carlos. It is 1965, and Diego is a full-time revolutionary battling the Franco regime together with a clandestine ring operating between Paris and Madrid. Their activities include smuggling incendiary fliers into Spain urging mass strikes and protests. The police have somehow acquired information about the identities of Diego’s associates in Madrid, leading to several disappearances and arrests. Diego is forced to make a quick exit from Spain to France with the aid of a bookstore owner, Jude (Dominique Rozan), sympathetic to the revolutionaries. At a police checkpoint, their car is pulled over and they are detained for interrogation. Diego carries a false passport belonging to a collaborator named Sallanches and has been primed with detailed information about Sallanches and his family should the need arise, as it has. He is able to answer casually the question put to him. The inspector (Michel Piccoli) demands his home number and calls, reaching Sallanches’ daughter, Nadine (Geneviève Bujold), who, fortunately, is fully up to the task of playing along with the deception, even expressing alarm that her “father” has been detained. Diego and Jude are permitted to continue on their journey and Diego soon catches the train for Paris.

Diego’s first priority is to warn the members of his organization of the arrests and deteriorating situation in Madrid. He finds, however, that the leadership in Paris is unconvinced and unsympathetic to the extent of the danger in Madrid. They are preoccupied with making sure that plans for the anticipated mass strike are not averted. From his first-hand experience in Madrid, Diego knows too well that their efforts are failing. There is no strike imminent, but the leadership in Paris accuses him of having lost perspective on the struggle.

Diego pays a call of the Sallanches household in order to cover himself and make arrangements for returning Sallanches’ passport, in case the police follow up. There he meets the beautiful Nadine, who is also involved in resistance against Franco, and the two are immediately attracted to one another, despite an age difference of twenty-five years or so. There is a romantic interlude, which Resnais films stylishly rather than explicitly.

Diego is concerned for the welfare of one of his compatriots, Juan, who is headed to Madrid and wants to return and warn him, but he is “grounded” by his superiors. They will send another operative less well known to the Madrid authorities. Diego therefore takes the opportunity to visit his longtime Parisian mistress, Marianne (Ingrid Thulin). She has some co-workers visiting and we see first hand the complex web of deception that Diego has to weave in relation to what he does for a living. When alone, Marianne expresses her love for Diego, her desire to have his baby, and to live a normal life together, even if that requires living in Spain. If a normal life is out of the question, she’ll settle for the baby! In another stylish love scene, Marianne and Diego renew their genuine love for one another in bed. Before their ideas in relation to the future can develop further, Diego is informed that the operative who was to be sent to Madrid has died suddenly and that he will be returning after all. Soon after he departs, Nadine learns that the police in Madrid have set a trap and are waiting for Diego. She informs Diego’s organization and they send Marianne to try to head Diego off before it’s too late.

Themes: La Guerre est Finie is not really so much about revolutionary ideas or issues as it is about the life and stresses of being a revolutionary. That’s a good thing, because the old Communist ideological underpinnings of this particular leftist group don’t play all that well today, especially in America. It’s not the abstraction but the deglamorized actuality of fighting the system that counts here. Diego has to deal not only with the loss of associates by arrest or disappearance and the fear of slipping up and being caught himself, but also with his doubts about the competence of his supervisors and the viability of his cause. History records that Franco repression was not so much overcome by leftwing resistance as outlived. Spain survived Franco for no better reason than that Franco was mortal while Spain as a nation will outlast any and all individual Spaniards. After devoting his life to the cause, Diego found it utterly distressing that the hoped for national strike was no more imminent in 1965 than it had been five or ten years earlier. Marianne’s desire to settle into a normal lifestyle augmented his doubts and we share those doubts as well. The film establishes that Diego’s state of mind is its subject matter by fastidiously sticking with his point of view throughout. We never see the opposition except when Diego spots them. In this way, the film separates itself from a conventional thriller pitting bad guys against the protagonist. The result is more tense if less action oriented.

Production Values: Like his fellow New Wave auteurs, Resnais introduced exciting new techniques of filming and editing. For La Guerre est Finie in particular, Resnais pulled out all of the stops. It is the technical artistry, really, that makes this film what it is, much more than either the story or the themes. The story is sometimes confusing and fragmented and the themes are partly antiquated from the perspective of almost forty years later, but the style with which the film is delivered is as stunning today as it was in 1966, even if the techniques are more familiar to audiences today than they once were. The black-and-white photography of Sacha Vierny is very appealing and especially rich in its variety of grays.

One novel technique introduced in this film was the “flash-forward.” There are also the more conventional flash-backs. Frequent use of the two creates the feeling of atemporality, despite the relatively linear storyline. The story progresses, but with flashes of past and future elegantly interspersed.

Even more impressive, from my point of view, is the way that this film mimics the associative process of the human mind. Resnais uses image montages to mimic the way that associations crop up haphazardly in thought. There is one sequence, for example, when Diego is trying to imagine what Nadine (who he has not yet met) will look like and four consecutive imagines of young women flash across the screen in rapid succession. There are other occasions when unidentified images flash across the screen that represent Diego’s recollections of something past or anxieties about the future. We are not always certain which images represent events that have already occurred and which just his imagination. Thus, we get a sense of the feeling state of Diego’s mind without always knowing exactly how those feelings relate to the narrative. The editing in this film is unusually complex and brilliant.

The soundtrack is another strength of the film. The music is intriguing and sets the right tone and atmosphere for the film. Resnais is as much a master of sound editing as image editing. He uses sound to help us sense the protagonist’s affective state through a range of emotions.

Yves Montand is perhaps best known for his later appearances in the pair of films Jean de Florette (1986) and Manon des Sources (1986) (see my review at Jean de Florette/Manon). His list of credits also includes, notably, Wages of Fear (1952), The Sleeping Car Murder (1965), Z (1969), The Confession (1970), and State of Siege (1972). Ingrid Thulin is best known for her work with Ingmar Bergman in such films as Wild Strawberries (1957) and Cries and Whispers (1972). La Guerre est Finie was the debut film for the lovely Geneviève Bujold, who I freely admit to adoring for her work later the same year in The King of Hearts (1966). She had later appearances in such films as Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), Coma (1978), Choose Me (1984), Trouble in Mind (1985), The Moderns (1988), and Dead Ringers (1988). All three of these leads were superb in La Guerre est Finie. Michel Piccoli, who had a rather minor part in this film, went on to a long and distinguished career in such vehicles as French Cancan (1955), Contempt (1963), Belle de Jour (1967), and La Nuit de Varennes (1982).

Bottom-Line: La Guerre est Finie is an unusually artistic film – sublimely stylish if sometimes difficult to fully comprehend. The ambiguities are mostly not of the frustrating variety, however. They help us understand the conflicts and mental struggle that exists in the protagonist’s mind. On style points, this film is five-star all the way. The narrative is somewhat less than five-star and the ending is not fully satisfying. I’d like to give this film 4.5 stars, but, lacking that option, I’m going to have to rate it at four. The DVD version of this film (from Image entertainment) has a high quality 16:9 image transfer, a satisfactory audio transfer, optional subtitles, and optional English dubbing (though no one should want that option). There are no extras whatsoever – not even the theatrical trailer. La Guerre est Finie is in French with a running time of 116 minutes.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age