(WARNING: story discussed in explicit detail)
Some find La Grand Illusion (Grand Illusion, 1937) formless, which I suspect only proves Renoir's artistry. The film does have a design, buried in so much minutiae, told in such an unprepossessing manner, that you can't really be blamed for missing it (as if Renoir ever intended you to see it in the first place). The film is structured like a three-act play, with trimmings: a short prologue gives us the setup and introduces two of four major characters-- Boldieu (Pierre Fresnay) calls out Mareschal (Jean Gabin) to join him on a reconnaissance mission; a quick wipe and Boldieu and Mareschal are POWs meeting the third major character, the officer who shot them down, Rauffenstein (Erich Von Stroheim).
Love Von Stroheim-- a great director in his own right-- here; love his monocle, his casually arrogant posture, his leather jacket so tight a manservant must yank from behind while he shrugs out of it. He looks like a matador after his first morning bullfight, or a surgeon after his first vasectomy of the day--coolly confident, yet flushed with the excitement of a recent conquest. Already, Renoir establishes their dynamic, with Rauffenstein effortlessly warm towards upper-class Boldieu, tolerantly polite towards the middle-class Mareschal.
The first act proper begins with the first prison camp, where Boldieu and Mareschal meet the last of the four major characters, Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio). A lot of comic business follows-- the digging of the escape tunnel; Rosenthal's luxurious food packages; the prisoners’ merciless ribbing of poor Arthur, the kindly dim much put-upon German guard. A sad note sounded when Mareschal is thrown into an isolation cell, for celebrating a French victory; ironically, it's 'poor Arthur' who tends to the airman in his cell, clucking over his charge like a worried hen. Arthur with Mareschal, and Rauffenstein with Boldieu demonstrate Renoir's thesis, that friendships can happen between men of different countries, though Renoir is enough of a realist to admit not usually between people from different social classes.
Pause to note that when Mareschal shoves Arthur out of the way in a desperate escape attempt (his first), and Renoir’s camera stays with Arthur in the cell instead of following-- there’s a terrible inevitability about Arthur’s (and the camera’s) quiet patience; they know they only have to wait the few minutes necessary for Mareschal to be captured and beaten before he's returned unconscious to his cell.
First act ends when the tunnel the prisoners are digging is abandoned because the prisoners are being transferred; the punchline to the whole first third of the film-- all that dirt and effort went for nothing. Plus the cell where the tunnel entrance is hidden is being handed over to some American soldiers who don’t know a word of French, and can’t understand what the French soldiers are so desperately trying to tell them.
Second and central act begins months later, at a high stone fortress (my viewing companion noted, not without cause: "looks like the Castle of Dracula"). Rauffenstein is back, this time in a metal neckbrace, living in the stronghold's chapel (is Renoir suggesting a monk suffering in his asceticism?). Rauffenstein gives the officers a tour, more for the benefit of Boldieu than for the others; we the audience come along to acquaint ourselves with a crucial setting, and to emphasize the impossibility of escape from this stone monster).
Of the climactic prison escape I have little to add, save I love that Mareschal insists on shaking Boldeiu's hand for the first and last time and Boldieu insists on keeping his gloves on, firmly if politely distancing himself from Mareschal’s sincere gesture. Also love the little pirouette Rosenthal does, twirling the escape rope from his waist while Mareschal feeds it down the window.
Once Mareschal and Rosenthal are gone, Boldieu and Rauffenstein are finally free to express their feelings for each other. True to form, they do so with exquisite restraint-- Rauffenstein complaining bitterly of his poor marksmanship trying to hit his leg while Boldieu consoles him, citing distance and poor visibility. Boldieu’s death prompts Rauffenstein to commit the grandest gesture in the film, killing the single most beautiful object in the prison to pay tribute to the most meaningful relationship in his now-friendless life. (Just realized that the way I described the ending one can easily read queer overtones; certainly Boldieu’s and Rauffenstein’s feelings were intense enough, but I think such a suggestion ultimately unfair--surely anyone can appreciate an intense bond between two men that transcends physical sex. I submit tho I'll admit I can just as easily be wrong that a purely sexual reading would reduce the moment, not enhance it.)
Third act is the oddest; Mareschal and Rosenthal spend a pastoral holiday in a German farmhouse with a widow. It's as if Renoir felt they needed a furlough, and threw together one of the loveliest pastoral interludes this side of the Garden of Eden (instead of a serpent a cow; instead of a temptress a farmer’s wife; instead of an apple a Christ child carved out of a potato-- not as sweet but funnier, and just as tasty).
The film ends with a short epilogue, of the two men crossing the border into Switzerland. Note that Mareschal enters Germany on wings with one Frenchman (Boldieu, an aristocrat), leaves Germany on foot with another (Rosenthal, a Jew). Fade to black.
Does La Grand Illusion still speak to us today? Nowadays, Platoon and Apocalypse Now represent state-of-the-art antiwar films--with the added irony that these warnings of the horror of violence come up with ever more glamorous and spectacular ways of depicting said violence. I think we've reach some kind of saturation point and that Renoir seems to stand alone on the opposite side, arguing not that war is such a terrible thing (it is), but that what we have in common is too precious to wreck by indulging in something as wastefully destructive as war.
Some of the funniest and most touching moments in this film come out of Renoir’s sense of common humanity-- out of the way he depicts human goodness. Goodness and compassion in La Grand Illusion isn’t treated as the sentimental embarrassment it is in our more cynical times; tt breaks out from the most startling places-- between a French prisoner and his German guard; between two fellow officers; between a German patrol with rifles cocked and their fleeing French targets. Goodness in La Grand Illusion might even be considered an insidious, corrupting influence-- it sneaks up on you and makes you do surprising things. Goodness, as Graham Greene once noted (in I think Brighton Rock or The End of the Affair), acts a lot like sin sometimes-- subversive and not a little perverse. Certainly a source of Boldieu’s amusement is his feeling so silly for doing something so noble; he never expected it of himself, and he’s embarrassed (may also be part of why he never gives in to Marechal’s friendly overtures). He's already obsolete, now he’s playing the hero? How crass! And how touching and ultimately tragic that he feels it so crass.
And even if none of this seems relevant-- if war has moved beyond Renoir’s humanitarianism-- you might at least be able to appreciate the sense Renoir gives you of a vanished age, of a class and lifestyle rendered irrelevant. You might be able to appreciate the need of people in this film to reach out; appreciate the quiet poetry of Renoir’s film, the simplicity of his storytelling-- something else that seems to have passed, in this world of sensual overload.
First published in Menzone Magazine, 11.2.01
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