SECRET AGENT
Sklar, Robert
SECRET AGENT by ROBERT SKLAR THhe current Alain Resnais film, La Guerre Est Finie (The War Is Ended) begins as if it were a European remake of For Whom the Bell Tolls. It opens on a bridge...
...At the core of La Guerre Est Finie lies a belief in the possibility of political revolution, in the practical reality of Diego's life-work...
...In Diego, Resnais has created a character who assumes an artistic life almost independent of the political setting...
...It opens on a bridge crossing from Spain into France...
...nothing has changed, not the danger, not the boredom, not the apparent futility of all they say and do...
...Inside men sit around a table, talk, plan, plot...
...What can be said for the bravest of heroes who courts danger by beating his head against a stone wall...
...Paradoxically, the apparent futility of Diego's political efforts has helped to make La Guerre Est Finie more popular and less controversial than otherwise it might have been...
...La Guerre Est Finie has a hero who is yet not a hero...
...Imagine the difference if Resnais had taken Vietnamese revolutionaries as his subject, or Algerian, as has his younger colleague, Jean-Luc Godard...
...La Guerre Est Finie is a movie about politics: specifically, about the Communist apparatus of Spanish exiles who live today in Paris and plot the overthrow of Franco, thirty years after their defeat in the Civil War...
...His book, "F...
...The experiment does not seriously interfere with the realism that is Resnais' primary achievement in this film...
...After this poor start, La Guerre Est Finie becomes an interesting, even a moving film, if not a completely successful one...
...La Guerre Est Finie ends neither in tragedy nor in pathos, but with an open future, a future not settled either for victory or defeat...
...But clearly Resnais and Jorge Semprun, the novelist who wrote the screenplay, wanted to prove their man was cool and tough before they could afford to show him spending long hours sitting around in a chair...
...Women love him...
...After the opening bit of Hemingway melodrama he becomes in fact less heroic as the movie goes on, more of an ordinary man in an ordinary political job...
...That night, in Paris, a young girl he has just met quickly invites him into her bed...
...At this meeting Diego disputes the planned distribution in Spain of leaflets calling for a general strike...
...It invites comparison to the recent Academy Award winner, A Man for All Seasons, for both films center on the same moral and intellectual concern, the role of character in politics...
...The unity Resnais has achieved is only a tenuous one, attained at the cost of some intellectual compromise and artistic formlessness...
...La Guerre Est Finie, instead, gets better as it goes on...
...He says that it will endanger lives, perhaps destroy their apparatus...
...Liberals love the cause of Spanish freedom and radicals delight in live revolutionaries at work, while few conservatives defend the Franco regime...
...In La Guerre Est Finie Resnais has avoided the pitfalls of A Man for All Seasons essentially by compromising, by answering yes both to character and politics, by having it both ways...
...In the end Diego goes back to Spain, perhaps into a trap the police have set...
...Yet the long hours of sitting in chairs provide the most real and most dramatic moments in the movie...
...From outside come bird songs, children laughing at play...
...As Diego, the professional revolutionary, Montand performs exceptionally well in conveying the character of a hero who is part of a group, the hero who is a political functionary...
...Patience, patience—we will win out in the end...
...SECRET AGENT by ROBERT SKLAR THhe current Alain Resnais film, La Guerre Est Finie (The War Is Ended) begins as if it were a European remake of For Whom the Bell Tolls...
...The generations confront each other...
...This time he has tried the mental flash-forward, a momentary picture of an imagined future moment...
...Yet he has not endowed Diego so fully with a separate character that one can accept or appreciate him apart from the way he spends his life...
...A few days have passed...
...For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Man for All Seasons are ostensibly about politics, too, but it is curious that these two American films about political struggles in foreign countries should be so obviously romantic, so individualistic, so fundamentally apolitical...
...Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoon," has just been published by Oxford University Press...
...Diego's patience in the end unites character and politics, invests the movie's political activities with a meaning greater than simply nostalgia or bureaucratic inertia...
...Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoon," has just been published by Oxford University Press...
...The war is over, but the struggle goes on...
...It is Resnais' realism at its best...
...A young man speaks with harsh practicality: a few plastic bombs would accomplish more than a million leaflets, would frighten the tourists away, cut off the economic boost they give the regime...
...Meanwhile, his Ingrid waits—Ingrid Thulin, not Ingrid Bergman, if one should still care...
...A filmmaker, of course, should not be asked to settle questions on which few philosophers agree: how human character affects political events, how politics shapes character...
...Yet one does still care...
...Hazy sunlight pours in the windows...
...We know at once that he is lonely, brave, heroic—engaged in a dangerous mission, no doubt fated for a tragic end...
...A narrator, trying hard to sound like Hemingway, evokes memories of the Spanish Civil War...
...Though A Man for All Seasons begins well, it fades swiftly into banal posturing and simple-minded morals...
...In La Guerre Est Finie Resnais has not completely given up his taste for experiment...
...The sensory impact overwhelms you: outdoors lures, the boredom makes you dizzy...
...In a car on the bridge sits Yves Montand, lean, tall, a French Gary Cooper, his strong, stoical eyes fixed on the frontier check-point ahead...
...but with each new experiment into psychological states— Last Year in Marienbad in 1961 and Muriel in 1963—his reputation has rested on shakier foundations...
...His book, "F...
...It is springtime...
...Diego rejects this, arguing with the same phrases that had condemned him at his own cell meeting a few hours before...
...La Guerre Est Finie has these, but its most memorable scene occurs when the party cell meets in a suburban Paris apartment...
...Later, safe in France, the wife of his driver eyes him hungrily...
...Since Hiroshima, Mon Amour first raised him to international prominence in 1959, Resnais' reputation has rested on his capacity to create psychological mysteries...
...It is this apparent futility, finally, with which the viewer must come to ROBERT SKLAR is a free lance critic and an assistant professor of history and American studies at the University of Michigan...
...In response the leader reprimands him, accusing him of ideological error...
...Whatever Resnais' motives in making a movie on Spanish Communists in Paris, clearly he has chosen a political subject pleasing to many and offensive to few...
...Yet one may still assess how he has made a work of art upon his chosen theme...
...terms...
...ROBERT SKLAR is a free lance critic and an assistant professor of history and American studies at the University of Michigan...
...Ingrid Thulin follows, hoping to stop him in time...
...Lacking a sense for politics, ultimately they lack a sense for the character of their political heroes, too...
...Later Diego's young girl friend takes him to a meeting of youthful terrorists...
...Resnais' sense for politics is far stronger, though one may feel it is not acute enough...
...Love-making, cops and spies, foreign intrigue, domestic squabbles can be seen at your local movie every day...
Vol. 31 • August 1967 • No. 8
