Jean Renoir's films are exquisite works of art.
So that each frame and second can be appreciated like a painting.
Like The Great Phantom, like The Rules of the Game, he neutrally and gently presents the wartime human world from the perspective of the aristocratic or leisure class, a calm lament, a surviving illusion, and a chaotic expectation.
The film tells the story of a prisoner-of-war camp during World War I, and itself was filmed in the early stages of World War II, and the director did not mix the righteous or unjust views of war in the work, but shot the film as a sadist elegy with a humanistic tone.
No one knows how long it will take for the war to end, but it will take longer than expected.
In the film, people of different classes are locked up in prisoner-of-war camps, some of them escaping from prison one after another, and some of them are making fun of themselves. Even if the war is raging, even if they are in prison, people still have to keep their identities. The Germans drank soup, the French ate cabbage and sent cans inside the package, the Russians ate cabbage roots, and the British ate pudding. German officers always have a gentle intellect, humanity sometimes shines under the uniform that symbolizes responsibility, the performances of French actors at the camp party are pleasing and wonderful, and the cold German officers can also be amused, and give the Harmonica to the French soldiers in confinement. Yes, this war dragged on too long. In Germany or France, responsibility is responsibility.
Rosenthal said to his fellow inmates, "You people, even if you have been authentic French since your ancestors, you have not had even an inch of land in your own land. Lo and behold, the Rosenthal family had the means to own three historic castles in thirty-five years, with hunting grounds, ponds, fields, fruit groves, rabbit farms, fish farms, pheasants, and horse farms, all of which should be preserved, plus three galleries that collected the authentic works of ancient painters! Don't you think it's worth escaping to defend all this? His companion Bourdian responded: "I never considered patriotism from that perspective. Similarly, there is pinda, the Greek professor, and the geranium of the warden Rofenstein. The private material possessions and spiritual food, the freedom we are determined to defend, which we call, become ridiculous or even worthless under war.
The German warden Rofenstein and the Frenchman Podio in prison belonged to the same aristocratic class, and they felt sorry for each other, but what was the use, spotless white gloves; stiff leather boots; straight waist; the posture of the clerk, in the change of the times, can only become a funeral flower of self-pity. Podio chose to attract attention, allowing Rosenthal and Poldian, who had taken a different route, to escape, while he himself fell under The Gun of Rofenstein. Against that backdrop, there is no difference between the living and the dead, and Podio tells The Injured Roffenstein that you will continue to live in vain.
The decline of the old era and the emergence of a new order are the torrents of history. In the past, even any illness was linked to class. But now, this privilege has disappeared along with some other privileges. Cancer and rheumatism are no longer the exclusive diseases of the workers, lung diseases do not belong only to intellectuals, and liver diseases and gastrointestinal diseases are not only those of the bourgeoisie. Some are slowly becoming popular. To escape from the camp, everyone had to take turns digging tunnels underground.
Rosenthal and Portian in the Alps were survivors of the escape, and the German peasant women took them in and finally the German soldiers stopped looting because "they were already in Switzerland", further sublimating Renoir's anti-war themes. The peasant woman pointed to the empty table in the house and said that my husband and brother had died in the war, and that now the table was too big, but Rosenthal and Portian did not stay, but left a promise to invite German women to France, and then the two who accompanied them would eventually be separated.
The promises and pauses in the gunshots are like this uncontrollable war, and no one knows whether it will happen or when it will end.
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