The War is Over

Jorge Semprún’s contribution as screenwriter partly shapes the interpretation of Alain Resnais’s 1966 film. Diego Mora, a member of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE)—played by Yves Montand, whose sympathies with the communist movement were well known—lives in exile in Paris. He frequently crosses the border under false identities to make contact with underground militants in Spain. After returning from a particularly dangerous mission, he begins to question the meaning of his actions and the party’s strategy. The title of the film is inspired by the communiqué issued on April 1, 1939, in which Franco announced the final victory of the Nationalist troops. Its release coincided with a moment of discouragement and disillusionment in the face of the political void and the dead end in which the anti-Franco opposition was trapped.

By the mid-1960s, Spain was no longer in the state of political and social tension that had marked the 1930s, and the prospect of a massive general strike leading to the fall of the regime had become a fantasy. This assessment—still unacceptable to the historical leadership of the PCE—was instead championed by Semprún, who, in addition to criticizing the lack of internal party democracy and taking a critical stance toward the USSR, no longer believed in the imminence of regime change. Written shortly after Semprún was expelled from the PCE for revisionism and defeatism, the script of The War Is Over portrays a bleak and uncertain landscape, which comes across as a critique of the Communist leadership’s triumphalism. The character of Diego Mora (a projection of the screenwriter himself) disagrees with the Party’s optimistic voluntarism, as he vainly argues that the PCE’s actions should be aligned with the actual political and social realities in Spain. He also clashes with members of a peculiar “Leninist Group for Revolutionary Action,” which has adopted a strategy of terrorism.

The film was banned both by the Franco regime and by the Communist opposition. The Spanish Ministry of the Interior demanded its removal from the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival, and the Communist apparatus succeeded in preventing its screening in the official selection of the Karlovy Vary festival in Cezhoslovakia. It was not released in Barcelona until April 1977.

JPA