The War Is Over

A film that moves between Paris and Madrid. Diego is a Spanish communist in exile. He lives in France and crosses regularly into Spain on a false passport. His task is to keep contact. He carries word between the organisation in Madrid and the leadership in Paris. The film opens at a border post. The passport check drags on and hundreds of possibilities pass through Diego's mind while he waits; the narrative gives them as images. That method continues throughout. Diego imagines a woman he has never seen and the narrative shows several versions of that imagining one after another. He returns to Paris. The organisation is planning a general strike and Diego does not believe in it. Years have passed. He has been doing the same work for twenty years and thinks Spain is no longer that country; the organisation still talks as it did in 1936. There is a group of young people as well. They are impatient; they want to plant bombs, and Diego opposes them too. Nadine is from that group. Diego meets her and there is a brief affair. Marianne is the woman he has been with for ten years. She lives with a man whose identity is not even real and can no longer carry it. What the narrative is interested in is not politics but exhaustion: the film does not ask whether a cause is right; it describes the sense of pointlessness in a man who has given it his life. The screenplay is by Jorge Semprún, who had done this work himself; he had operated in the Spanish Communist Party's underground organisation in exile. The film has a censorship story too. It was withdrawn from the 1966 Cannes competition at the request of Spain's Ministry of the Interior. Even so it won France's Louis Delluc prize the same year. Yves Montand, Ingrid Thulin, Geneviève Bujold and Jean Dasté are in the cast. Alain Resnais directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes political cinema and Resnais's play with time. Who it is not for: anyone expecting action; the film is almost entirely talk and interior voice, with very few events.