Grand Illusion
Directed By: Jean Renoir
Written By: Jean Renoir and Charles Spaak
When I started watching Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion, a nice warm feeling had permeated my viewing experience. Here was definitely one of the most humanistic war films I had ever seen; whether it be evident through the good-hearted discussions between French aristocrat Boldieu, played by Pierre Fresnay, and German aristocrat Rauffenstein, played by Erich von Stroheim, or a touching scene where the isolated and disturbed Maréchal, played by Jean Gabin, is given a harmonica by an elderly German guard in a small act of kindness.
By film’s end, those tender feelings had mostly dissipated.
On the surface, Grand Illusion is an oddly optimistic film about one of history's deadliest conflicts. Enemy combatants exchange petty insults or even pleasantries while World War I rages on somewhere in the distance. As if to make the war seem more distant, only two deaths occur in the entire film: one of them occurring off screen, while the other occurs by a mere accident.
Upon further analysis, Grand Illusion is about the pure futility of the war and how it destroys absolutely everything in its wake. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in a scene where a lonesome German widow reminisces on the “greatest victories” of the German army by recalling each of her relatives that died in those battles.
The film starts when two French pilots, Boldieu and Maréchal, are shot down and captured by German aviator Rauffenstein. Upon capturing them, Rauffenstein invites the duo to lunch, in a pleasant scene that reveals that Boldieu and Rauffenstein are related by the aristocracy. The scene presents the emotional core of the entire film, the tragic and poignant relationship between Boldieu and Rauffenstein.
After being transferred from prison to prison, the pilots are sent to a high-security fortress led by Rauffenstein. Now wearing a neck brace and gloves to cover the scarring and burns from a nasty aviation crash, Rauffenstein finds himself yearning for a position that would allow him to be more useful in the war. Boldieu and Rauffenstein maintain a warm friendship all until Rauffenstein is forced to shoot Boldieu after he stages a distraction that allows Maréchal to slip past the guards and escape from the prison. What follows is the saddest scene in the entire film, a deathbed conversation between Boldieu and Rauffenstein. "For a commoner, dying in a war is a tragedy. But for you and me, it's a good way out, ” says Boldieu to Rauffenstein. The relationship represents another casualty from World War I: the aristocracy and class system of Europe. Stroheim gives a flawless performance as Rauffenstein, a man stubbornly struggling to hold on to a collapsing social order in the face of never-ending destruction.
Some may argue that the scenes that comprise the latter part of the film with Maréchal and German widow Elsa, played by Dita Parlo, are unnecessary and simply a way of shoehorning a romance into the mix. To do so would be to dismiss a storyline that also dispels of any notion that war is at all useful through the minor, if noticeably gentle conversation between a random German soldier seeking directions and Elsa, to the major implication that love knows no political loyalties or geographical boundaries.
The final scene is of Maréchal and his fellow escapee, Rosenthal, crossing the Swiss border. They are subsequently fired upon by German soldiers, who immediately stop upon realizing that the pair have crossed into Switzerland. It’s a moment of mercy that plays well as a summary of how Renoir views human beings. It doesn’t, however, contradict the extremely cynical view that Renoir has of war itself and the complete destruction it lays upon the world, whether it be the life of a German widow, or the entire social order of Europe.
Up Next: Torment (1944)
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