a world of the dead
by Douglas Messerli
Jean
Renoir and Charles Spaak (screenplay),
Jean Renoir (director) La Grande
Illusion (Grand Illusion) /
1937, USA 1938
Seeing Grand Illusion the other day upon the large screen of Los Angeles'
Laemmle's Royal Theatre, I perceived this film in a new way than I had watched
it as a young student years before. In
the interim, I had attempted to view an old VCR tape, but the quality was so
washed out that the subtitles were impossible to read and it was painful even
to the eyes. This 1999 restoration was, in every way, a revelation.
Even the film's final escape into German territory, where the two
survivors, Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin) and Rosenthal are forced to cohabit
a small cottage with a widowed German farm woman (Dita Parlo) and her daughter,
is presented as almost idyllic, and the two men's final escape into Switzerland
is greeted with respect and appreciation by the German soldiers attempting to
track them down.
In short, one might ask, what is this film, so obviously
cinemagraphically well-conceived, really about? War, at least from Renoir's
perspective, is certainly not hell and, at times is even lauded, particularly
by the aristocratic career officers, Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and
von Rauffenstein. Even if we take Renoir's own statement that his film is
"a story about human relationships" that demonstrates that the
commonality of mankind is far more important than political divisions, Grand Illusion seems, at first sight, a
timid statement of pacificism.
The film's seeming relativism, moreover, seems even more strange given
the movie's date, 1937. Although World War II, if one ignores the
Japanese-Chinese War already raging in 1937, is generally dated as beginning in
1939, there was no question at the time of the work's filming that Europe was
moving in the direction of another violent encounter between countries. Hitler
had become Chancellor of Germany four years earlier, the Italian Fascist party
under Benito Mussolini had seized power nearly a decade before. France had
allowed Italy to conquer Ethiopia and in 1935 the Territory of the Saar Basin
was reunited with Germany, repudiating the Treaty of Versailles. In return for
Germany's support of their Ethiopian invasion, Italy dropped their objection to
Germany's desire to absorb Austria. By 1937, almost anyone except perhaps for
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, would have recognized that the
whole continent was again about to explode into war.
Renoir's gentlemanly depiction of the previous war's prison camps,
accordingly, seems almost cowardly in retrospect. Yet, Nazi Propaganda Minister
Joseph Goebells named Grand Illusion
"Cinematic Public Enemy No. I," ordering all prints to be
confiscated. The French authorities banned the film in 1940 for "as long
as the war should last." When the German Army marched into France that
same year, the Nazis seized every print and negative of the film for its
ideological criticisms of Germany. What are we today missing in that picture?
In part, it is simply Renoir's great sense
of irony that has been lost. For years now I have maintained that irony has
disappeared in the young, to be replaced instead with satire or camp
exaggeration. A long tale told through vignettes that subtly play out a
conflicted statement is perhaps hard to comprehend in a time of pastiche.
Let me attempt to explain Renoir's masterwork by suggesting that the
world it portrays was recognized by most intelligent viewers of the time as a
world that had long before been destroyed, that the characters of Grand Illusion existed, at the time of
the film's making, in a world of the dead. Accordingly all their values,
whether fascistic or humane, were "grand illusions," visions of a
world that would be destroyed by the war in which they were engaged. By moving
us away from the front lines, removing us from the playing fields, so to
speak—and Renoir's work is very much one about the relationship of soldiers and
children at play (consider Captain de Boeldieu's statement: "Out there,
children play soldier...In here, soldiers play like children.")—we can
more vividly see the delusions of all concerned.
The most obvious of those delusions is the
absurdity of class, the belief, encapsulated in both Captain de Boeldieu and
von Rauffenstein, that in their aristocratic commitment to their military
world, that they stood somehow apart and superior to the political divisions
which they were ordered to impose. Having just finished reading Joseph Roth's
wonderful fiction, Radetsky March, a
few weeks before seeing Grand Illusion,
I am struck by the parallel conclusions of Roth's and Renoir's visions. If
nothing else, World War I completely shattered the smug contentions of moral
superiority embedded in militaristic nations such as Germany, Austria, and even
France. As grand as these gentleman officers might have perceived their world,
it was they who brought war into existence and it was they, as a class, who
were most obliterated by their involvement. The only difference between de
Boeldieu and von Rauffenstein, is that the former comprehends that he
represents a world of the past to be replaced by the working class officers
like Maréchal and outsiders such as the Jewish Rosenthal, while the survivor,
Rauffenstein, lives on as a kind of mad Frankenstein, his body made up of metal
and wood, much of his blood and bones having been destroyed in battle after
battle. But even von Rauffenstein knows what lies ahead: "Believe me, I
don't know who is going to win this war, but whoever it is it will be the end
of the Rauffensteins and the Boeldieus."
Yet, Renoir does not stop here in revealing his characters' personal
illusions or delusions. War has already made them comprehend numerous realities
that they had previously not conceived. For most of them, their wives back in
France have taken up with other men, and their own sexualities, once so
completely defined, have come into some question. One of the most touching
moments in the film is the arrival of theater costumes, women's dresses, by
which the men, who will soon don them for the joy of entertainment, are amazed
given their short length and their silky textures, changes in styles since they
have left home. As one young man puts on a dress and wig, the others stare,
jaws locked in wonderment: for them he is clearly the reincarnation of
womanhood, the stunning object of their desires. Renoir goes no further in this
revelation of gender transformation, but we, as perceptive theater-goers,
comprehend its significance.
If class differences seem to have truly been obliterated, racial,
religious and social differences are still very much alive, as, fed up with
each other, the escapees, Maréchal and Rosenthal, suddenly turn on one another,
hurling epithets that no longer have meaning. They reunite, but the pain of
those abuses never quite heals.
Renoir's gentle German farm woman, Elsa, is only too pleased to invite
the two invaders into her home; after all, her own husband and brothers have
been already killed in the war, in the horrible battlegrounds—Verdun, Liège,
Charleroi, and Tannenberg from which Renior has kept his audience—and she is
lonely.
Although they both escape into Switzerland, the last few images are of
them attempting to move forward as their feet become entrenched in the deep
snow. And we recognize, as Renoir certainly did in 1937, that in the world to
which they return, if they make it, they once more will be conceived of as a
"rough" mechanic and a "rotten" Jew; certainly Rosenthal
might not have survived what came after. In an early version of the script,
Rosenthal and Maréchal, near film's end, agree to meet in a restaurant at the
end of the war, with the final scene, celebrating the armistice, showing two
empty chairs at a table.
In short, what may have appeared as a gentlemanly world based on codes
of honor, valor, and trust, are just as destructive, so Renoir suggests, as the
bombs and gas in the trenches at battle's front, offering no more hope for the
future than a bullet to the heart.
Los
Angeles, May 24, 2012
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