It was peasant stock and noveau riche who belted out national anthems and honored the borders which in wartime could sever lover from lover but, paradoxically, also shield prison-camp escapees who made it across them to sanctuary. The old elites loved nothing but their class and its accoutrements. Up close and personal, war separates humans from their lives and aspirations, lovers from their beloveds. The subtext is the eternal tension between "in the air" and "on the ground," "on high" and "here below," "from a distance" and "up close and personal." From a distance, war is no more rancorous than a chess game, with national boundaries as artificial as the squares on a chessboard. The whispered subtext, the nuanced conflicts, and the ironic complexity make for a film that is timeless. The fine acting, the deft pacing, and the fluid camerawork make for a film that could have been produced last year. The restoration lets us see that nothing is dated about this work of genius, even if its POW-camp situations today seem stock and its characters stereotypes of nationality and class. Restored from its original camera negative, the 1937 French film now on DVD sparkles like new.
Whatever side won, the hoi polloi would gain the upper hand. Jean Renoir's film presents us with an irony: the martial elites of France and Germany needed the war to vouchsafe their very identities, and yet that conflict would prove their undoing.
"La Grande Illusion" in 1914 was the hope that that old order could be preserved in the face of surging democracy and noveau-riche power. The masses had new and different loyalties. Their castles in the air, their noble worldview, their time-honored way-all would crumble, as they very well knew, if the line between the rabble and themselves were allowed to continue to blur. War was what they did, these aristocrats of l'ancien regime.
In the old European order, pre-WWI, one nation's aristocracy made war on another's not out of love for king and country or hatred for the enemy, but out of a sense of honor and duty.
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