The War Is Over
1966, directed by Alain Resnais
On Easter morning, 18 April 1965, a car carries two men across a bridge in the Basque Country from Spain into France. Traffic is backed up at passport control, and the car stops halfway across the river, by chance right on the border. Underground revolutionary agent Diego Mora, aka Carlos, is in the passenger seat, traveling on a borrowed passport, and The War Is Over will trace his brief visit to France as he tries to intercept a comrade in danger. The film ends as Diego nears the Spanish border at the other end of the Pyrenees, still trying to catch up with his friend Juan.
The fact that Diego is introduced precisely on the international boundary tells us much about him and about the story. He will be defined as a man caught in the middle – between past and future, between democratic France and totalitarian Spain, between two courses of action, between two leftist factions with different agendas. When he says his final good-bye to 20-year-old activist Nadine Sallanches, a second woman flanks him on the subway steps, complaining: “An old person like me… you could be more careful!” …reminding us that he’s also caught between youth and old age.
The point is emphasized in Diego’s two successive meetings, first with his old guard Spanish refugee comrades on Monday, then with Nadine’s Revolutionary Action Group on Tuesday. In one he casts doubt on the efficacy of a general strike, citing Lenin in his support. With the young radicals he finds himself defending the strike, mocking his opponent’s use of Lenin as “a prayer wheel”. It’s not that he’s inconsistent. Having spent considerable time both in Spain and in France working to overthrow Franco, he appreciates better than most the pitfalls of arrogant certainty.
Most reviewers of The War Is Over gather that much, describing Diego as a disillusioned activist, a realist worn down by the lack of progress in three decades of fascist dictatorship. From this point of view, however, the film might come across as a statement of hopelessness, most likely from scriptwriter Jorge Semprún, after whom Diego Mora is styled. The title suggests that the often-romanticized struggle of the long-ago Spanish Civil War has come to an effective end. Nevertheless Semprún, like Diego, appears to have remained true to his ideals, and the film is open-ended. If we’re to derive anything beneficial from the film, we must find a way to reframe it.
One possibility suggests itself if we’re familiar with director Alain Resnais’ strategy in his 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour. There, with one big neon-lit clue to tip us off, he had refashioned and largely inverted the classic film Casablanca to make his point about facing the past honestly. Despite its many reversals of Casablanca however, Hiroshima mon amour remained true to the older film’s ideals, upholding the constructive value of memory expressed in the famous line “We’ll always have Paris.” It’s fair to suppose that The War Is Over does something similar.
Right after passing the French border checkpoint, while visiting his driver’s wife’s bookshop in Hendaye, Diego tells his hosts about Nadine, who had answered the guard’s questions so cleverly on the phone. He’s never met her personally, and now he begins – in one of roughly twenty-five “thought balloons” that interrupt the film’s contemporaneous action – to imagine what Nadine might look like. A quick montage of young women approaches Nadine’s gate in the Latin Quarter, exhibiting a variety of hair colors, hairstyles, and dress. The first one stands out for her unmistakable resemblance (at least from the rear) to Jean-Luc Godard’s regular lead actress Anna Karina. Nadine’s nickname Nana is a likely allusion to Karina in Vivre sa vie, and Nadine’s love scene is derived from Godard’s film (without Karina) A Married Woman. These clues should help us to notice that The War Is Over is modeled on a Godard film starring Karina from one year earlier – Alphaville.
Both Alphaville and The War Is Over concern a secret agent’s visit to Paris or to a fictional city played by Paris. Alphaville begins with a traffic light blinking on and off; The War Is Over begins with stop and go traffic. Holidays overlap both trips. Godard’s film ends with Lemmy Caution and Natacha von Braun driving off together; Resnais’ film ends with Diego driving off with his assigned driver, while his wife Marianne accompanies him in a double-exposure, traveling simultaneously to Barcelona. Each protagonist goes by an alias, meets one or more fellow agents, begins an affair with a much younger woman, and endeavors to bring down a tyrant. Both settings mix old Parisian buildings with modern architecture on the outskirts. Both films are full of jump cuts, abrupt inserts, and foregrounded signs or placards. Miscellaneous phrases and images echo Alphaville, like the opening voice-over telling us that the sun rises (“le soleil se lève”) over Elizondo, recalling Lemmy Caution’s description of Tokyorama, or the shot of Diego’s hand wrapped around Nadine’s foot, recalling the head-foot cartoon at the Institute of General Semantics.
Like Diego, Lemmy Caution is portrayed as a man positioned between extremes, like the “caution” signal in the middle of a traffic light. He crashes the tyrannical supercomputer by feeding it a string of paradoxes, which a binary mind is ill-equipped to resolve. Both films are made near the height of the Cold War, and even if Diego sympathizes with Bolshevism, his realist stance pits him against the absolutist habits of both sides. His struggle is against Franco, not against the more moderate capitalism of France. When he tells Nadine that internationalism means “revolution at home” he expresses a political modesty that’s uncharacteristic of extremists.
The similarities to Alphaville underscore a few key differences. The War Is Over lacks the triumphal arc of its predecessor, going not to the opposite extreme of defeat but rather embracing the nebulosity of perpetual struggle. Diego repeatedly stresses patience as the virtue of the revolutionary. In many ways Resnais’ film is like a grown-up remake of Alphaville. It’s less cartoonish, eschewing harsh contrast for a predominantly gray tone. Everyday settings replace science fiction conceits. Giovanni Fusco’s score for Resnais is lyrical and mysterious in contrast to Paul Misraki’s loud and jagged score for Godard. The jump cuts are psychologically grounded in the narrative, unlike the bravado of Alphaville‘s avant-garde stylistics. Additionally, The War Is Over implicitly favors Diego’s mature outlook over Nadine’s romanticism (she calls his job “exciting”) and her young friends’ embrace of terrorism.
In the final accounting, though, none of these differences negates Alphaville‘s argument. Godard’s comic book aesthetic had served a serious purpose, calling attention to the falsity of abstract thinking, the poverty of language that reduces the world into polarized political, sexual, social, economic, and moral categories. Lemmy Caution’s real victory was to make room for a greater plurality of language and thought, in opposition to the computer’s absolutism. In the same sense, Diego Mora is rooted in concrete reality. His comrades in France downplay the perceptions of field agents in Spain:
“You know our friends there tend to exaggerate. Only natural. They think everything is collapsing. No… they’re too close to things to see them clearly.”
“Do we see them better two thousand kilometers away?”
“Sure. We have an overall view.”
Roberto says this to Diego in Ramón’s house Sunday evening. Hours later Ramón will be murdered there, vindicating Diego’s fears. Roberto is Diego’s friend, but his “overall view” not only proves arrogant, it also elevates abstraction over the messiness of close observation. Nadine’s friends also take an abstract view of things. They tell Diego right off that the cemetery outside their window “clears the view”, symbolically exposing their willingness to treat random deaths of tourists as an abstraction. A telescope in the room suggests that they, like Diego’s associates in Paris, prefer to take a distant view of things. A few minutes later we’ll find Diego in another cemetery at Ramón’s funeral. This time the graves are anything but abstract.
Looking at The War Is Over as a remake of Alphaville alters the force of the ending, dispelling any sense of resignation. Certainly Diego and Juan are in danger across the Spanish border, but their arrest is expected in Madrid, and it looks like Marianne will catch them in Barcelona in time to relay the order to return to Paris. The alternative to their arrest may also look dismal – the planned strike will not come off, and Franco’s regime will remain secure. Still, things are not hopeless. The old war may be long over, but the struggle goes on. Diego may be disillusioned, but he’s never drawn into apathy. As he tells his houseguests, it’s no longer “the dream of 1936, but the reality of 1965.” The argument against oversimplified thinking in Alphaville is also directed against the attraction to easy solutions. The embrace of reality must not be equated with giving up. The War Is Over is ultimately a defense of the long game in politics.
As we know now, history has vindicated Semprún. Franco lasted another ten years, but since then Spain has been a liberal democracy, more resistant than other European countries to the pull of right-wing authoritarianism. In the penultimate scene an inspector tells Nadine that underground figures like Diego occasionally become government ministers, and in 1988 Semprún would become Spain’s Minister of Culture.
CONNECTIONS:
Hiroshima mon amour – Alain Resnais film that refashions, inverts, and ultimately agrees with another classic film
Alphaville – Secret agent’s visit to a capital city; Cold War political background; argument for complex reality over abstraction; ends with a man and a woman traveling away from the capital; Paris settings with modern architecture; romance between aging man and young woman; jump cuts and inserted signs
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her – Reworking of Alphaville that brings the science fiction premise down to earth
The Passenger – Middle-aged man traveling through Europe and sleeping with the daughter or likely partner of the man whose identity he assumes