Grand Illusion
In the past, I’ve respected Jean Renoir becuase I knew I was supposed to, because all the film experts said he’s a great director. I saw La regle du jeu a long time ago…so long ago that I was probably too young to appreciate it. Because of his reputation, I’d been putting of Grand Illusion, expecting it to be good, but tedious.
It only took about ten minutes to disabuse me of the latter portion of that thought. You know when you’re watching a film, and you’re suddenly hyperaware that you’re watching a great film? Not great in the dry, film studies must-see Citizen Kane sort of way, but in the living, vital, immediate sort of way. That’s what watching Grand Illusion was like. The knowledge that you’re seeing something special…even though you knew it was special through reading about it; but here it is experientially. Not all “great films” have this quality, forget about whether they’re actually “great” or not. Direction, photography, acting, dialogue, story, everything that goes into making a film is near-perfect here. It’s proof-positive that acting in old movies isn’t always hackneyed or old-fashioned. Jean Gabin and the others could hold their own with any modern actors hands down.
Gabin is a French pilot in the early days of WWI. He and another officer (an officer of the fading gentleman class of military) go on a routine reconaissance mission, but are shot down and become prisoners of war. The POW scenes are fascinating, because the prisoners are practically treated as guests. They are allowed entertainments and packages, and have an amazing amount of freedom within the prison camp. Renoir even addresses this in an introduction filmed for Grand Illusion‘s rerelease, and pointed out how different the beginning of WWI was to WWII…before the entrenched warfare of 1916-1918, WWI was sort of the last gentleman’s war. And that is explored, as the French gentleman officer is given special treatment from the German prison-camp commander, who is one of the last of the German gentlemen soldiers. I don’t know whether I believe that whole dynamic or not, but it works within the story quite well.
Despite how well they’re treated, of course, they still want to escape, both to see their families again and to continue fighting, and the majority of the film is taken up with escape attempts. But through it all, Renoir never loses sight of the characters, and their humanity. Despite this being a war film, there are no scenes of war. There is only the background of knowledge that it is there, and our hindsight knowledge that though they are confident it will be over in a few weeks, it will last much longer and be much more devastating than they can even imagine.
It covers a lot of ground, but each scene, each line, each glance is perfection. I would like to watch it again for the first time.
