Rebel Without a Pause

La Guerre Est Finie. At the Spanish border a car is checked by the guards, then sent on its way. Unknown to the police, it carries a pair of Red agents bent on toppling the Franco regime. Still another peek into the spyglass?

So it seems, until Director Alain Resnais warms to his real work: examining the mind and mores of a Spanish Communist refugee who lives in France but plots to undermine Spain's government. Diego, the refugee (Yves Mon-tand), refuses to concede that the Civil War ended in 1939, that for all but a dwindling detachment of long-memoried men La Guerre Est Finie--the war is over. Diego travels a dreadmill between the two countries in constant fear of arrest. He knows that for him there can be no victory, only an avoidance of defeat. Still, out of a habit that seems a stranger within his skin, he continues the gritty business of contacting comrades, smuggling propaganda into con- voluted Spanish cities where, in T. S. Eliot's phrase, the streets follow like a tedious argument.

Living far from home and close to the bone, the aging agent has a few elemental joys: cigarettes, a glass of wine, and women--his mistress (Ingrid Thulin) and a girl (Genevieve Bujold) who believes that a man so far left must be Mr. Right. A dry, desperate soul, Diego nonetheless has a fugitive imagination as agile as an alley cat and a sixth sense of survival in a treacherous by-world of Byzantine complexity.

La Guerre has no real beginning or end. At the film's conclusion, Diego is off to Spain to instigate a hopeless general strike in Madrid, unaware that the policia are closing in. His mistress boards a plane to bring him back to the safe harbor of France, fearful that she may be too late, that this time he has finally bought a one-way ticket home. The official French entry at last May's Cannes Festival, La Guerre was withdrawn from competition under pressure from Spain. It is easy to see why: the villain of the piece is all too clearly the Franco government. Yet as Jorge Semprun's script makes clear, the revolutionists are not precisely heroes either. In the film's most insightful scene, Diego confronts a group of young incendiaries hell-bent on burning Spain to the ground. Both sides are presented as helpless amputees of history; the old rebel has a past but no future, the terrorists a future but no past. Communication is impossible; experience and extremism meet and pull apart without once having touched.

As in Hiroshima Mon Amour and Muriel, Director Resnais is obsessed with the mixture of memory and desire, and his overly literary Guerre at times seems both pat and prolonged. Viewers, however, are not likely to be bored with the performance of actor-singer Yves Montand. With a sour, craggy face fatefully evocative of Bogart and Camus, he exhales an air of melancholy strength that makes Diego seem as abused and battered as an old zinc bar--and just as uncorrodible.

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