Alain Resnais was part of the so-called Left Bank of the French New Wave, alongside with Varda, Marker and Demy, who were politically much more aware compared to the film fanatics of Cahiers du Cinema (Rohmer, Truffaut, Rivette, Godard, Chabrol). Alain Resnais has always been interested in past but here he focuses on its impact with regards to the future. The War Is Over was his fourth feature, following Hiroshima mon amour, Last Year in Marienbad and Muriel, and still remains as one of the finest films of political cinema. The film builds around the theme of how to come to terms with one's past in order to live in peace with the present. No other place -- maybe Germany or Poland -- offers such a great setting for this but Spain because the shadows of the Civil War are so present. It is a milieu that has become the symbol of the war, so to speak.Diego Mora (Yves Montad) is an old man who spent his youth as a revolutionary in the Spanish Civil War. Now, thirty years later, he's part of a group that wants to redeem the dreams of the revolution in Paris. All the members of the group are living in the past, and so is Diego. But soon he has a moment of realization and breaks himself away from the chains of illusion and decides to make a change. Thus, The War Is Over is really a story about a man who is living a lie. It tells, rather bleakly in a melancholy tone, about old communists who can't let go off the past.The War Is Over might just be Resnais' most satisfying work when it comes to somewhat coherent viewing experience. It's his first film with a clear storyline which is relatively easy to follow even if the editing was deliberately (but not self-deliberate!) ambiguous and confusing. Resnais has succeeded perfectly to relay the flow of time. Moreover, through the character played by Yves Montand the viewer can understand the director's thoughts and emotions, no matter how shattered, because he holds the pieces together. It is he through whom the viewer constructs the big picture.In The War Is Over memories are created for the future. Alain Resnais doesn't try to build the horrors of the past by newsreel footage. He relays the tragedy of the conditions by showing how people are still living in the past, how they are left with unredeemed dreams in their hands. The dream has died in Spain. Of course, Spain is still there but merely as a concrete place full of tourists. People don't understand each other. There is a major breakdown in the communication between the old and the new left. Both are dreaming of a revolution but in their own ways. The legacy of the past torments the protagonist. However, he is not only forced to recall the past endlessly but also to be unable to understand the present reality.

Yves Montand plays Diego Mora, a Spanish-born refugee living in France but working for the underground resistance trying to overthrow Franco's fascist regime. He's been in this life for years and is becoming disillusioned with the futility of his actions and the inability of his colleagues to change their modus operandi.The story starts at the French-Spanish border, Diego is stopped by the authorities. He was meant to meet a contact in Madrid as part of a plan to organise a general strike in Spain. The police let's him go but he feels something's wrong and his suspicions are confirmed when his friends start being arrested. So he returns to reorganise himself, meet the leaders of the resistance, and spend some time with his love, Marianne (played by Ingrid Thulin).It may sound disappointing to say that not much more happens in the course of the movie, but this movie is not a traditional political thriller. A viewer expecting suspense and tension will certainly find better options. The War Is Over is in fact a character study and an illustration of how futile and unpleasant fighting for one's convictions can be.Through the life of Diego Mora, we discover a world of freedom fighters that cinema seldom portrays: it's boring, it requires patience, it hardly achieves anything, and it's bogged down in rhetoric and theory instead of inspiring action, and no one is thanked for their personal and emotional sacrifices. This is the life of ordinary people who've given up their personal lives to fight for something they believe is worthy but who live forever in the uncertainty: is it all worth it? There are some scenes that stand out for its contrast of ideas: for instance, when Diego meets the leaders of the resistance, he suggests cancelling the general strike. His views are criticised for being too blinded by reality. It seems that Diego, spending too much time in Spain, can't see the big picture anymore, as opposed to the bourgeois-living leaders in Paris with their ideas and quotes from Lenin and other Marxist theorists. If you can't appreciate the black humor of this situation, this movie won't do anything for you.In another scene Diego meets, through a teenager who admires him, several young men who are planning to use explosives to fight Franco. It seems they're more in tune with his line of thinking, preferring action over theory. But Diego can't see eye to eye with them either. Exactly what does Diego want? That's the great existential mystery of the movie.I watched this movie because Jorge Semprún wrote it. Most viewers will come to it via Alain Resnais' name, but this director has never done much for me. So I have little to say about the editing or the cinematography. For me the quality of this movie is focused mostly on the screenplay and the acting.Jorge Semprún was perhaps more interested in politics than Resnais, as we can see by the movies he wrote later: Z, Special Section, The Confession. In these movies I admired his subdued approach to political thrillers. Rather than glamorising, making things exciting, he preferred to dismantle things and analyse them, get to the core of them. That is precisely what he does in The War Is Over, in showing perhaps the most realistic portrait of life in an underground resistance in cinema ever.

Resnais really impressed me with this film. He uses real locations and finds subtle atmospheric things that almost never turn up in movies. One sees the way a shadow of a tree moves gently back and forth on the wall as two people relax in bed, the way a gust of wind briefly animates a woman's hair in a subway tunnel. The movie successfully combines an account of resistance to Franco's Spain from an ex-patriot living in Paris (played by Montand), and his life outside of politics. We see not only his political views, but also how he feels about love and his own situation. Beautiful, brave and innovative, this movie also has some of the most passionate, yet restrained and overall fascinating love scenes that I have seen since Peter Sellers and Shirley Maclaine in 'Being There.'

Spoilers herein.So many European films from this era have faded. They were about notions disguised as ideas that on reflection were less precious than we thought. But this film has grown in my experience. It somehow touches an important place deftly: perhaps the adhesive is wonder about the value of previously clear passions.At any rate, here we have misters `Marienbad' (Resnais and Vierny) exploiting the very territory they outlined in that film: but rather than reality being constructed by memory, here it is constructed in a more realistic way -- by coming and going, by rendezvous, by assignment, by getting there.If someone described what was attempted here in words, and I did not know the film, I would think it impossible. Angst of later life, the increasing emptiness of the motion, the growing concern that the motion itself is fragile, the indication of that by some chance encounters (some sexual, some mistaken), the logic behind the motion is disintegrating.But it does work. This film finds just the right emotional groove, mostly visual. Much more successfully than, say Antonioni. Part of the art is subtle annotation of what it is: Marianne is putting together a book of images of place (`I can't describe it in words'). There's a writer. There's lots of motion about swapped ID photos and all that entails. Many doors. A fair amount of time and memory folding.A life with film is a constant process of evaluating who you are, what you cast off and what you accept and incubate within. This may not turn out be a lasting friend to every viewer, but it has for this one.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 4: Worth watching.