![La Guerre est Finie [DVD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51NW2F2EZXL._SX300_SY300_QL70_ML2_.jpg)
This is definitely one of the greatest films ever made and a true classic of the French New-Wave. Ultra-Subtle and layered within a deceptively simple surface naturalism is what this film is all about & no one should even bother watching for a conventional 'thriller' here, they'll have to dig deep beyond the dialogue to find it, and when they do, it'll only lead them down a whole lot of other paths they never bargained for requiring they bring even more to the film themselves for proper appreciation. In other words, the film is loaded with information but unfriendly and frustrating to the sleepwalking and comatose viewers. Still, it's a much more accessible film than 1963's awe-inspiring "Muriel": Resnais paces "La Guerre est Finie" in a more conventional-audience-friendly-way, not hitting them with too much surface-information at one time, letting the complexity of Semprun's seemingly simple scripted situations set up elegant little visual gestures that poetically open up deeper, unanticipated layers of perspective. If you can't pick those gestures up and appreciate their significance you'll miss maybe 60 to 70% of the film's value and impact which has little to do with politics. In fact, though Semprun was a Marxist, Resnais himself was never either on the political left or right, and wasn't trying to make a political statement, being too modest to think he had the experience or knowledge necessary to do so (which was a fortuitous hang-up, just look at most of Jean-Luc Godard's sub-mediocre, pretentious 'political' films of the late '60s and '70s).
So, while plenty of filmmakers in the '60s tried to make big 'revolutionary,' 'politically committed' statements on film and only occasionally succeeded ("Weekend," "Z," "Before the Revolution," "The Conformist," "Black Jesus," "Battle of Algiers," "Burn!"), Resnais used the politically-committed characters in his film to make a study of what drives these people who are involved in these goings on year after year and their disillusionments when reality refuses to conform to their stubborn dreams and ideas.
Resnais is totally in charge here, at the top of his game: there isn't even a remote comparison to be made between the superior quality, elegance, and poetry of "La Guerre est Finie" with its utterly sub-mediocre and similarly Semprun-scripted & Montand-acted 'sequel' made by Joseph Losey in the mid-'70s "Roads to the South." Resnais' fantastic editing virtuosity, his rearranging of time and the narrative techniques used to imbue the present with a constant sense of the past and the future, push this seemingly simple film to the highest post-Citizen-Kane levels of narrative cinema (exemplified at its most fully realized and advanced point in Resnais' previous film "Muriel).
Besides having one of the most beautiful musical scores of any film, courtesy of Mr. Giovanni Fusco (the Rolls Royce to Ennio Morricone's Ford Mustang), "La Guerre est Finie" can boast of no less than three BEYOND ICONIC performances. Yves Montand, of course, was THE icon of the French cinema and night-club world at the time, and representative of everything that was 'hip' in the older generation that was being supplanted in the '60s. The younger generation of the world's youth could and would accept someone like Montand much more readily than they might a more uptight, conservative guy like Jean Gabin, Frank Sinatra, or even Elvis! Here he gives one of the greatest performances of his career as a communist-Bolshevik, anti-Franco 'professional revolutionary' of the old school accustomed to patience and long-term subversive manuevers who becomes involved with a charming young girl(fantastically portrayed by a young Genvieve Bujold, whose characterization becomes ICONIC, in retrospect, though Resnais might have even sensed it at the time, of everything about the passionately explosive yet naively doomed younger generation of the '60s) who's part of a new-school of Leninnists that prefer more direct terrorist methods. As an ICONIC representative of the creme of elegantly hip, sophisticated European women of the older '50s generation, we get non-other than beautiful Ingmar Bergman regular Ingrid Thulin. Thulin's performance is just as fantastically nuanced as Bujold and Montand's and may even be the best of the three, it's debatable. She seems to absorb all the film's many emotional levels in her characterization, without any traces of unweighed, unruminated judgments showing in her facial expressions. Everything is there instantly on that face: a deep strength in her very tenderness: the precise type of woman who can both anchor a character like Montand's in his precarious occupation or provide him a possible way out of a possibly 'lost battle,' a 'finished War,' a 'war' that he's waged for years and is having many doubts about the results of, and which he's seeing tragically and absurdly beginning again in Bujold's younger terrorist group with all the old mistakes intact and many more.
"La Guerre est Finie" was both a popular and critical success (it topped the New York Times best films of the year list) when it was released in the U.S. in 1967 (though the popular success probably had a lot more to do with the presence of Montand and the two very original sex scenes in the film than anything else). And now, after being unavailable in any home-viewing format for many years, it's out on DVD, and anyone who's interested can watch it as many times as necessary and find out why even accomplished directors like Bertolucci and Scorsese and Tavernier look up to Resnais' best films for inspiration.
The DVD transfer is nowhere near exemplary but still quite good and brings out the many shades of light gray used in the awesome black and white cinematography of Sacha Vierny. I only detected a few very negligable lines in the conversation scene in the car between Montand and Bujold. The widescreen tranfer isn't undermatted, it's a perfect 1.66 to 1, and it's anamorphically enhanced for widescreen TVs. You can switch the subtitles off and there's a ridiculous sounding dubbed English option included although only a moron would watch a film as meticulously subtle as this dubbed for anything more than a few laughs. The dub track comes in handy for picking up some easy dialogue to slow-down the general quickness of the film when you're too lazy to read lenghty subtitles. I certainly wouldn't make it a habit though! You're not watching a Spaghetti Western or Kung Fu film here where the dub almost becomes part of the joke. No real French film buff would watch Scorsese's "Raging Bull" in anything but the original English with French subtitles, in order to be able to pick up all the many New York Italian-American tough-guy conversational nuances that are so much more eloquent than the mere words themselves, and neither should any non-French-speaking Americans when watch Renoir or Resnais in anything but the original language and idiom it was made in. A film as complex as "La Guerre est Finie" could've definitely used some enlightening audio commentary from a film scholar or critic worthy of the name, but alas, the general public is left once again to its own devices to go ahead and misinterpret this great film. Those not content to be one of 'the general public' should go to the libray and check out John Francis Kreidl's out-of-print book on Resnais, where he spends a whole chapter going deeper into the elegant complexities of "La Guerre est Finie."
Top reviews from other countries
Café ☕
Perfecto para los amantes del buen cine.
Reviewed in Spain on January 1, 2017dieter uhlen
a great french movie of Alain Resnais
Reviewed in Canada on April 7, 2014hocquard
en bu ray , c'est parfait, tant pour les images que le son
Reviewed in France on September 26, 2021