A beautiful, unsentimental look at political radicalism outclasses the spy-movie genre.
Revolutionaries chant “La lutte continue” (the struggle continues), so Alain Resnais, in a more thoughtful response, made the 1967 film La guerre est finie (The War Is Over). Diego (Yves Montand) is a Communist operative still smuggling messages and colleagues from Spain into France, 30 years after the Spanish Civil War. He’s committed, but weary. The strained life of subterfuge affects his relationship with fellow traveler and lover Marianne (Ingrid Thulin), which is further complicated when a new contact appears, nubile young firebrand Nadine (Geneviève Bujold).
This unconventional triangle conveys only part of Diego’s inner conflict. He’s a radical, but also a man of conscience — an important distinction. The examination of the moral cost of Diego’s personal and political choices makes La guerre est finie a truly great movie.
La guerre est finie’s two-week revival at Film Forum, distributed by The Film Desk, is a welcome occasion during this period of social mistrust — when film-culture leftism confuses its political stances with its artistic mission. Resnais triumphs differently. At the height of the political turmoil of the Sixties, anticipating the hallowed protests of May 1968, and in the middle of that decade’s aesthetic ferment, Resnais captured the essence of the moment’s spiritual ambivalence, conveyed through Sacha Vierny’s grave, smooth-textured black and white.
Resnais resists the sentimentality that usually goes unexamined in partisan movies. Instead, he rigorously exposes it through the central character of a disillusioned activist who shuffles several identities — Diego, Juan, Domingo, Sallaches, Chauvin — all soulfully embodied by Montand. These split identities, key to the deceptions of an operative’s secret life, give Le guerre est finie its fractured narrative form, keeping viewers curious and alert.
While Sixties commercial cinema was preoccupied with the Cold War in John le Carré–style thrillers and tongue-in-cheek espionage spoofs, Resnais (and screenwriter Jorge Semprún) looked back at passions associated with the Spanish Civil War that lingered among contemporary revolutionaries. This is a rebuke to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade self-righteousness that won’t go away. Distanced reflection allowed the filmmakers to go deeper — outclassing the political and spy-movie genres.
Resnais, considered the most abstract and intellectual of French New Wave innovators, is unappreciated for his pop-culture instincts (despite his famous friendship with Stan Lee), but La guerre est finie has the most immediacy of all his films, feeling less like an art exercise than an excursion into vital contemporary thought. The Diego–Nadine sex scene salutes the pop-art deconstruction of sex in Godard’s A Married Woman while the Diego–Marianne love scene evokes Bergman’s erotic intimacy (although Bergman never showed Thulin’s womanliness so vulnerable and yearning). The passion–politics complexity is James Bond for adults.
Yet it’s when a Resnais film becomes challenging to comprehend that it is most exciting. You’ve never seen anything like the sequence where a speech is double-tracked, heard over a meeting of middle-aged Communist revolutionaries. Resnais juxtaposes lecture and action, theory and practice, then shows how far these veterans have come from their early indoctrination. The participants are caught lost in their own thoughts. As we hear the analysis of a general strike in voice-over, their private doubts are exposed as we watch. The visual, sensual conflict of ideologies is heady — not in terms of propagandistic, Marxist argument, but in the poetic conflict of words, thoughts, emotions.
We experience the echo of orders in their heads, haunting their momentary inaction. Superb. It’s as good as Godard but without the witty didacticism. (Resnais gained from his peer, as Godard’s later La Chinoise would complement Diego’s disillusionment with young radical terrorists.) It’s fantastic cultural coincidence that Diego should confront a roundheaded Buttigieg lookalike who wants to “stop the sun,” to provoke “proletarian consciousness.” The runty despot accuses Diego of applying bad faith against a colleague: “He used a political concept that you changed to moral judgment.”
An artist’s moral judgment of politics suffuses La guerre est fine, buoyed by Resnais’s unsurpassed elegance: Quick cuts are thoughts, memories, impressions, not dully prosaic flashbacks or flash-forwards. In a great Bresson-like spy sequence, Diego follows Nadine and her secret men, while he similarly deceives her. Toward the end, Diego confesses that his profession considers “self-criticism” a fault. Probing anonymity and alienation is how a great filmmaker shows an activist-spy critiquing himself. La guerre est finie is the most exquisite, conscientious political movie ever made.
