It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Many folks who watch this film today might be a bit confused about the context, so I'll try to explain. When the Spanish Republican army was defeated by Francisco Franco's troops at the end of the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, many Republicans (many of whom were communists and socialists) were jailed or killed--and many more poured over the border into exile in countries like France.The character Yves Montand plays in this film, Diego Mora, is one of these communist exiles--one who regularly sneaks back and forth between the countries on missions for his cause. Exactly what he does on these missions is never talked about very much in these films but he and his comrades are trying to keep alive a small dissident group within Spain. However, during one of these many trips, he is taken in for questioning at the border. Somehow the police have become suspicious but with the help of a young French lady (Genevieve Bujold) he's able to extricate himself from custody. But, others in the organization weren't so lucky and were arrested. Because of this, Mora plans on returning to Spain to try to alert others in his cell so they can escape. However, instead of doing this, he spends so much of the film doing nothing in particular. In fact, that is a HUGE problem with the film. He learns about the possible leak in his organization and the arrests early on in the film and yet doesn't return to help the other agents until about 90 minutes later. In the interim, he meets with several women he cares about or wishes to have sex* with before his return to Spain. In addition, he talks and talks and talks--too much to keep the film interesting or well-paced. Overall, an interesting and well acted curio--especially since Montand himself was a communist and much of the story seems ironic in light of his own background as an Italian expatriate. But not a particularly enjoyable curio.*Oddly, the first sex scene in the film was one of the most unintentionally funny I have ever seen. Instead of showing any real skin, the camera kept showing everything BUT--and with all sorts of artsy angles and composition. It made me laugh and seemed bizarre in light of the very ordinary and non-prudish sex scene later in the film. Why they did this, I have no idea. Perhaps the first nude scene (with Bujold) was done this way because she was uncomfortable with nudity and I'd sure love to know why they handled it in such a silly manner.

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.

I was less interested in the political drama, than in the subtlety of the acting and the psychological realities of the film. I saw the main character, Diego, in a quest for identity, attempting to make an impact in this world, and constructing much of his life in his imagination as a part of his strategy to stay alive. When asked if he was tired of lying (about his work as a revolutionary and his identity) he responds that he is not lying but constructing "barricades" (to insure his safety).His quest to conceal his identity and stay alive can be seen as a parallel to the multiplicity of personae that we assume in this life, thinking that this is the only way that we might survive our life's experiences and prevent loss. It is a universal illusion that we can control our destiny and avoid the loss of love, admiration, meaning and purpose.As counterpoint, what the other characters thought so important and so real...the overthrow of Franco, the police preventing the revolutionaries from accomplishing that task, having a child with Marianne, making love (personal and impersonal)...becomes meaningless to him. Diego (if even that is his "real" name) cannot live a "normal" life in Spain, but he cannot live anywhere else. He is a Spaniard and can be only that. He "solves" his dilemma: he becomes tired enough to move towards his capture and death. A poignant, painful, resonant narrative of a life.

Alain Resnais was almost a god of cinema in the 60's. That people actually discussed the meaning of Last Year at Marienbad at parties seems unbelievable today (yet check the posts for Mulholland Drive), but it was a cultural object just as real as a Picasso painting. If I say that La Guerre est finie has aged badly, that's not to say that it didn't hold the attention of liberals 40 years ago.The politics of the main (male) characters are fossilized. The old Bolshevik ideals have become more and more detached from reality. Diego knows that there will be no general strike in Spain on May 1st, no matter how hard they will it to happen. Pamphlets smuggled by car into the country in false compartments are not being translated into actions. Diego's lack of authenticity is his real problem: he's spent most of his life in France, speaks better French than Spanish, and is watching people 20 years younger than himself taking more radical steps to end Franco's rule.Marianne has a greater grasp of reality than her lover. After nine years with Diego, she just wants to settle down and have kids, and put an end to the endless coded conversations with her friends (who are ignorant of Diego's revolutionary activities). She watches as Diego gets sloppy--driving with lights out while there's a suitcase full of plastic explosives in the car, as a cop stops them for questioning. Semprun's script makes Montand into a sexual magnet; has any 20-year-old girl taken off her clothes faster for a tired 45-year-old man? The star system dictates that the male lead be a stud, but there are limits.