When Jorge Semprun first wrote a screenplay about a Spanish Civil War fugitive living in French exile and carrying on the good fight, and Yves Montand took the role, the outcome was Alain Resnais's La Guerre Est Finie and very fine. Both author and star have tried to copy themselves here, although Resnais has been replaced as director by Joseph Losey (who, just after La Guerre, was entering his peak period of Resnais emulation). The Spanish expatriate of this scenario is a bit more comfortable than his predecessor, with a seaside home in Cherbourg and a successful career as a screenwriter, and the dramatic focus is on his relations with a couple of members of the younger generation even more horrible and misunderstanding than those in La Guerre: chiefly his son, who is a chip off the old block but works hard to deny it. The resulting film, never too far from interesting, but never all the way there either, is extremely good-looking (Gerry Fisher, cinematographer), but somewhat stiff in movement, and clumsy in getting its essential points across: there are some dull envisionings of a script-in-progress; there are colorless flashbacks to the old days; there is an extremely fortuitous bit of TV news footage; and finally there is that old standby, the discovery of a secret diary. With Laurent Malet and Miou-Miou. (1978) — Duncan Shepherd
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