La Grande Illusion and Renoir’s Other Films
Understanding how La Grande Illusion is located in Renoir’s career can help us better understand the film’s thematic and cinematic style. There is a strong connection between La Grande Illusion and Renoir’s 1939 masterpiece La Regle du Jeu. One thing that jumps out is the overlap of actors. In both films, Marcel Dalio, Julien Carette, and Gaston Modot appear, which creates the possibility of audiences seeing the two films as thematically connected. Both films have four key acts, with the final acts moving to the countryside and outdoors. Both films have a down-to-earth, working class, white air force pilot, whose authenticity as a Frenchman, tough vulnerability, loyalty and heroism made him a truly likeable character. Even more pronounced is the thematic parallelism about social class. Both films nostalgically address the end of an era of old European aristocracy.
However, although the imminent loss of aristocratic privilege runs through both films, there is one critical difference between the films. In La Grande Illusion, both aristocrats are acutely aware that their way of life is ending. Captain Rauffenstein says to de Boeldieu, “I don’t know who will win this war. The end, whatever it may be, will mean the end of the Rauffensteins and the Boeldieu.” In contrast, in La Regle du Jeu, there is no self-awareness. Every character continues to engage in their frivolous activities, believing that they can close out the march of time and the reality of imminent catastrophe by simply going inside their mansions and chateaus.
Source: La Grande Illusion, 1937 and La Regle du Jeu, 1939. A complete filmography of Jean Renoir can be found in Nicholas Macdonald’s 2014 book In Search of La Grande Illusion, at pages 243-246.
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