directed by Jean Renoir
written by Jean Renoir and Charles Spaak

I won’t lie to you. I watched this because it is Criterion Collection #1. That’s not a promise or a project; it just is what it is, and if I watch Criterion Collection #2 sometime soon, that too will just be what it is. As are all things in this world.

This movie goes by “Grand Illusion” in English, which is stupid. One of the special features on the disc points out that this is stupid, and then says that all the same, tradition is tradition. It should be “The Great Illusion” – not only because that’s a better translation, but because it’s named after this book.

Is this one of the greatest films of all time? In a way I want to stay true to my underwhelmption, yea even in the face of the cultural consensus; in another way I want to nurture and privilege the part of me that was affected by it.

I watched it a second time with the commentary track – an “audio essay” by a film historian (Peter Cowie) – and hearing that slight curatorial analysis clarified the problem. The problem is that film by its nature is a medium of contraption within contraption; movies that try to come at humanity open and whole, without artifice, always feel relatively flaccid. The filmmaker, by becoming a filmmaker, has chosen a path of trickery; if he then decides he wants nothing to do with trickery, he denies film its natural impulses. And yet I recognize that this openness, this distaste for artifice, is surely an honorable thing in a human being and in an artist. It’s just the refusal to concede to the idiomatic demands of the medium that is distracting.

Perhaps they weren’t yet idiomatic in 1937. Perhaps today Jean Renoir would gladly concede to the conventional demands that I perceive as inherent to the medium; he just didn’t feel them at the time because they hadn’t yet crystallized as standards.

But whether it was an intentionally “alternative” language and rhythm, or just turned out to be a side-branch in the evolution of mainstream “standard practice,” there’s no question to me that this movie (and others like it) operates at odds with current expectations about tension, flow, and structure. Those divergences are not themselves meant to be interesting; they simply are.

The film wants us (and the commentary corroborates these impressions of mine) to reflect on the resonances of various themes as they are embodied in images and events. That might sound like it’s true of all film, but it’s not; most commercial film is fundamentally narrative in structure and drive. “Meaning” bolsters the narrative, not the other way around. At most, they go hand in hand as equals. This movie smells like it’s going to be a hand-in-hand sort of movie, but really the narrative is just a servant of the meaning, and a somewhat neglected servant at that.

Essentially, the technique is painterly – film as a moving painting. Secondarily the technique is theatrical – film as a series of performances. Both of these aspects of this film are wonderfully and warmly done. But there is something essentially filmic about, say, Citizen Kane that is here somehow mishandled. Intentionally? The camera and the, er, montage, are so unflappably calm and thoughtful that we feel held at an observing distance from any tension in the story. “Please muse on this; but we wouldn’t dare trick you into getting worked up about it.” When a character is suddenly in danger, the camera gently glides around within the same shot to show us how things play out. When significant events pass off screen, we fade out and fade back in on the new state of affairs with a calm that would seem almost deadpan… if the movie had anything but warmth in its soul, which it doesn’t. The calm is simply reserve and someone’s idea of taste. When the incidental score kicks in, just as opera-pumped as any Hollywood score of the era, it seems entirely wrong about what kind of experience we’re having. “Please!” we want to say, “that music isn’t how life really is! No need to be so dramatic. Just be quiet – I’m watching a prisoner of war try to escape.”

But neither is the action “how life really is.” It’s, as I said, painterly, and theatrical. The calmer arts.

Does that stuff count for or against La Grande Illusion in the game of “greatest films ever made”? I don’t know what to think. For a first-time modern viewer, at least, it counts against, because it disorients. It also counts against if the game has to do with taking full and masterful technical advantage of the medium; that’s a progress-related game where the winner is more likely to be relatively recent. People who make pronouncements about the “greatest ever made” usually want the spread to be ahistorical, or if anything, skewed toward the past. So the criterion* is usually profundity, or ambition, or something like that.

As for profundity, I’m not sure this movie was particularly more profound than any number of other heartfelt works about war. I had reservations about the content as well as the technique. If the purpose was to show that war and prejudice are futile – a great illusion, as it were – it seems odd that most of the movie portrays war being conducted with astounding civility. The heart of the movie is in the idea that man does not actually want to be inhuman to his fellow man, and that it is tragic when he is forced into this posture by the imposition of war. I think. But to really make this case, it should have offered us someone who seemed to believe in war, and then showed that in his essential nature he did not. Or someone who seemed to be cruel but at heart was actually humane. Instead we see only the good in people, caught in the grips of absurd events and circumstances imposed from without. The philosophy of the movie seems to be encapsulated at the end – looking at an expanse of snow and wondering where the border with Switzerland is, the characters observe that the border is imaginary, that nature certainly doesn’t care about the difference. The point being: so too with the divisions between men that create war, and so too with war itself. But is that really so? Then, we must ask, where does war come from? Where is the error that creates the illusion? The movie is not interested in the error, only in asserting the truth of the matter; but by spending all his time showing people’s innate respect for one another (with a few remarkably mild exceptions) Renoir leaves us on our own to decide whether or not his philosophy is actually true in our real world, where people are frequently quite inhumane.

It’s a vision rather than an argument and a poem rather than a story. Does that make this higher, better art? I say not necessarily. Do that make it more pretentious, more effete? I say, with greater effort, but ultimately with conviction: not necessarily. It simply is the way this particular movie happens to be.

On both viewings, I found myself feeling quite moved by the sentimental aspects of the last 20 minutes of the movie. Somehow the domestic scale suits the “painterly” technique better. It’s easier for me to find the emotion in a bowl on a table when nobody’s life is at stake. Perhaps the skill that film technique has learned in the intervening years is adrenaline management.

Jean Gabin has effortless movie star charisma and does an excellent job. Stroheim is memorable and satisfying to watch – but is it just me or does he have an obvious American accent in all three languages? Fresnay does fine but his coldness is pretty complete. The commentator talked about the unseen emotion that must be under the surface. Yeah, maybe that’s the point, but it’s not on screen – just in your mind, and your term paper.

Here’s the main title, by Joseph Kosma (composer of “Autumn Leaves”).

* Not sure what the Collection’s eponymous Criterion actually is. Not sure there is one. Their website variously says that the films are “important,” “greatest,” “treasures,” “finest,” “defining moments,” and “Armageddon.”