This is a difficult film to evaluate if you don't simply take it as read that it's a classic. Film ended up developing in a direction different from Renoir's, and so his techniques can seem dated. His characters, for all their strikingness, are broadly-drawn types rather than individuals realized in detail; this approach to characterization meshes oddly with Renoir's gentle, intimate camera, which insinuates itself into a scene rather than commanding it. Except for a handful of memorable shots, scenes drift to a close rather than being punctuated. The soundtrack is sparing, and though sometimes this silence is effective, sometimes it's simply an absence.
Nonetheless, Grand Illusion is a sad and lovely piece in its own way. Its very mildness conveys its anti-war message without shrillness. Its view of war is at once timeless and immediately of its moment (1937). You feel the futility and inevitability of war, the endless cycle of modern European history, and at the same time you feel the change in the air. Watching it now is a singular exercise in historical irony; the aristocratic characters lament the war's (that is, WWI's) overthrow of a centuries-old gentlemen's code of battle; I believe Renoir meant us to understand that the code itself was nothing more than an illusion, but here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it's an illusion we don't even recognize except as a historical artifact.
In these times, I think it's worth peering into older views of war. You just might learn something.
Posted by Sarah T. at June 4, 2004 09:50 PM | TrackBack