Screening on its 75th anniversary in a gorgeous digital restoration, this is justly considered one of the greatest pacifist films of all time. Envisaged after the slaughter and destruction of WWI, its contemporary resonance also rests on something else beyond its anti-war message.
It’s not just the haunting star performances of Gabin and Von Stroheim, or the at once witty and horrific detail of camp life that makes this film so compelling. Something dark and chilling lies just under the surface of Jean Renoir’s incisive social portrait of prisoners of war pulling together for their heroic bid for freedom. The meaning is in the title.
The illusion is not just that post-war peace can be permanent, but the film tells us that the liberty, equality and fraternity engendered in the lacunae of such wholesale destruction of humanity seems only possible in the face of such horror.
Once the war is over the escapees will find themselves once more at the bottom of the social ladder as if their heroism, leadership and courage had never existed.
It’s this ambiguity at the heart of the film that has ensured La Grande Illusion’s continuing relevance and place in the pantheon of cinema.