"French or German, duty is duty. I would've done the same."

Rating: 9/10 (22 February 2009)

Jean Renoir's 1937 time capsule of poetic realism is all about tone, a tone of longing and cynicism. It has a heightened aestheticism, but one that doesn't draw consciousness to the representational aspects of the film. Long, fluid takes counterpoint the mood with a brisk pace. A bored restlessness. This film is a lot of things. It's riddled with symbolism, it has no interest in the war going on outside the walls of its POW camp setting and it captures a great feeling of male bonding and camaraderie. It's as if they're boys and the camp is a new school to them. Everyone alike complains about the food, the cold, the smells, what have you. Enemies are only enemies because it makes sense politically, not on personal level. "It's good to see you again, gentlemen," Joseph Von Stroheim says. "I'm sorry it had to be here." Even the planning of escape is patient and leisurely.
Their easygoing attitude is in part disillusionment. They see the sternness of the neighboring boot camp: "Those children acting like soldiers. In here, the soldiers act like children." Dry, sometimes silly humor complements the attitude. When a German officer tries to cheer up an exasperated Jean Gabin in solitary confinement, it feels like the scene in Animal House when John Belushi tries to cheer up Flounder by crushing a beer can on his head. The central drive of the story, a plan to escape, seems to be out of a sort of rebellion against boredom. As one German says, "The war's too long."
When I first saw this film at a screening at the Taft Museum, I loved it but I felt the ending ruined it. It felt tacked on, unnecessary. But now, seeing the film again, I've changed my mind. The farm woman is a widow, they're fugitives. Hey, lonely is lonely. She and her daughter are naive, the POWs are disenchanted. They refresh each other.
In this humanistic war drama, there is more frustration between classes than the sides of WWI. Everyone learns to give and take, without betraying who they are personally, without denying differences of culture and class. "Playing patience? Yes. I'm a realist," says one aristocratic character as he and the other prisoners hydrate themselves with small dreams, digging a tunnel by night, dressing up in drag to awaken their memories of womanhood, commemorating the smallest and most tentative of defeats to the enemy as news dribbles in from the front, or von Stroheim's sensitive care of a geranium in his fortress bedroom. I love Von Stroheim, his extreme Germanness and how he uses his character's injured spine to complement it. It's one of the many nuances that complements the paring down of all the characters' views of life. The grand illusion is nationality. It's man-made, and so are borders.