The Elusive Corporal

1940, the fall of France. A corporal and thousands of soldiers surrender to the Germans and are taken to prison camps. From the first day the corporal is thinking about one thing: escape. Various people join him along the way; a dairy farmer, a waiter, an intellectual whose eyesight is very poor, a working man from Paris. Escape attempts come one after another and most of them end within a few yards. It is one of Jean Renoir's last films and sits directly beside La Grande Illusion: the same director, the same subject, but this time 1940 rather than 1914, and the tone is more bitter. In the thirties captivity was a matter of gentlemanly conduct; nothing of that is left here. Jean-Pierre Cassel plays the corporal. A hundred and five minutes. The film does not tell a story of heroism; what it tells is how absurd the things are that a person will do to keep hold of the idea of freedom.