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.
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.