Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Eighteen Review: Grand Illusion

I've been dreading writing the review for Grand Illusion for a while now, not because I disliked the movie but because I'm not sure I have a lot to say about it. This is doubly disappointing considering Grand Illusion is supposed to be one of the great films of French cinema and a telling portrait of the French mindset right before World War II, but sometimes all those academic accolades don't make for emotionally-investing viewing, at least not for me. I said a while ago that I think it's harder to write a review for a movie I like than a review for a movie I dislike, but what's even harder is to write a review for a movie I find just adequately good -- I don't have much to say against it, but I can't exactly gush over it, either.

Obviously, I'm being a tad simplistic in saying that I have nothing to write about Grand Illusion; if the occasion arose, I could probably write a decent analytical paper on it, because it's certainly not lacking in Serious Themes -- in fact, I think part of the reason it didn't affect me more deeply than it did is because the themes occasionally trump the characters. The story is primarily one of class relations set against the backdrop of World War I; the director, Jean Renoir, not only dissects the issues of national identification and class identification in the early part of the twentieth century, he also suggests that French and German aristocrats had more in common with one another, even during wartime, than they did with the working classes of their own countries. The approaching obsolescence of the aristocracy is a major element of the film, as is ethnic prejudice and antisemitism (both increasingly relevant during Grand Illusion's release in 1937) and a more general commentary on the centuries-old relationship between France and Germany. Heavy stuff, in other words, especially for an American viewer who relies on subtitles to understand how the actors are relating to one another.

What Renoir does especially well is to show the human side of war, both through the friendship between the German captain (Erich von Stroheim) and French captain (Pierre Fresnay), and through Jean Gabin's working-class lieutenant's romance with a German farm girl. The relationship between the lieutenant and a Jewish soldier is poignant without being heavy-handed, as is Fresnay's portrayal of an aging aristocrat who realizes his world is dying and chooses to help the working-class representatives of the new order, even if he doesn't completely understand them. The plot skips around a lot, never quite settling into a uniform rise and fall, but the general uncertainty about what's going to happen next, even at the film's conclusion, works well with Renoir's message. To me, the title "Grand Illusion" speaks both to the fruitlessness of war and the especially convoluted quality of the First World War, where the entire European continent found itself embroiled in a battle that had largely grown out of complicated nineteenth-century politics. (This is one of the primary differences between World War I and World War II, when I think everyone, whether they were French, German, British, or American, knew exactly why they were fighting.) I give Grand Illusion immense credit for -- in 1937, no less -- creating a fair, non-hysterical recounting of the conflict between France and Germany twenty years earlier, even as an even larger conflict loomed on the horizon. I give Grand Illusion immense credit for being a well-made, well-directed, well-acted film in general. I just don't have much more to say about it than I already have.

Grade: A