Jean Renoir’s Grand
Illusion currently being revived at Film Forum is an essay on identity
politics of the most loving and global kind, which is to say a kind of identity
politics that doesn’t exist today. All the elements of race, class and religious
background that separate men are fully at work in the film and yet are ultimately assertions of the humanistic or liberal premise that there can be an empathy
and unity of purpose amidst difference. Still differences are literally what makes
horse races. The two aristocrats de Boldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and von
Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim) are denizens of the same Parisian restaurants, Maxim’s and
Fouquets, and also share a code of honor. “Je vous demand pardon,” von Rauffenstein
says, after shooting his counterpart. De Boldieu sloughs off the apology. It
will be all over for the Frenchman, but it’s von Rauffenstein who will have to
carry on. However the grand illusion itself is ambiguous. On the simplest
level, it’s an illusion that men are separated, but the term is also ironically
employed to the extent that the notion of conflict and war ending is also a grand illusion. The film has a picaresque quality that’s almost reminiscent
of Candide, particularly when the working
class Marechal (Jean Gabin) and the Jewish Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio) find an
idyllic respite in the middle of their grueling escape to Switzerland. It’s
reminiscent of Voltaire’s ironic reiterations of Leibnitz’s reality defying
optimism, “all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” When Gabin
says goodbye to the saintly German widow, Elsa (Dita Parlo), who has taken him in (and has become his
lover), we know that despite all the protestations, these two will never see
each other again. The gap between the worlds they inhabit is too great.
Monday, May 21, 2012
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