KnotMissPriceless Why so much hype?

Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Manthast Absolutely amazing

Seraherrera The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

jrd_73 La Marseillaise takes place during the phase of the French revolution that was the most optimistic and the least bloody. Director Jean Renoir is concerned with how this moment is viewed by both the monarchy in Paris and the everyday people of Marseillaise who march to Paris singing their song (Battle Hymn of the Rhine Army). His presentation is realistic and probably more accurate than most films that have dealt with the subject.La Marseillaise has been proclaimed as a masterpiece but, while I liked the film, I cannot share in that acclaim. Jean Renoir is considered one of the (if not THE) greatest French directors in film history. I love The Rules of the Game, but have found many of Renoir's other films slow going. This is true of parts of La Marseillaise as well. The running time is 132 minutes; there is (intentionally) no main protagonist; an assumption is made that the audience knows more about the historical events than some viewers (like me) may.Despite some restlessness on my part, La Marseillaise remains a worthwhile film. Every Jean Renoir film has wonderful moments, La Marseillaise especially. My favorite is Louis XVI's long walk with his family to Parilament. Renoir uses a crane shot to view the pedestrians. The dejected look on the King's face is powerful. He and his son share a reflexive moment over fallen leaves. This scene powerfully contrasts with the buffoonish way Louis was portrayed at the beginning of the film. This is a perfectly made scene. The film has other great scenes as well. Although it did not affect me as deeply as it has others, I would recommend La Marseillaise, especially to French film admirers, students of Jean Renoir, and history buffs.

LobotomousMonk La Marseillaise depicts lesser known stories attached to the events in Versailles in 1789 which led to the downfall of the monarchy. Renoir continues with a consistent stylistic system - great depth of field, two-shot closeups, framing of crowds, mobile framing, polyvocal (accents). In fact, aristocrats and citizens receive the same treatment from the camera. The exception is with the King and Queen who receive one-shot closeups, however, this seems more in the service of a dialectic regarding the Brunswick Manifesto than it being about psychological identification. This story is symbolic and likely the symbolism and abstraction is what led to the film not being as popular as was expected. There is also a confusion for the spectator because of Renoir's humanist treatment. Bumpkins are charming, aristocrats are accepting and armies more or less fight together instead of against each other. Renoir often spoke out against violence in film and this might be another disappointment for audiences at the time. Most violence is dissuaded through crafty acts of oration. The brains over brawn theme certainly lacks something of the 'common touch'. The breaking down of the song into parceled quotations reminds of the French New Wave's often lyrical and intellectual modes of expression. There is a monarchist rhetoric that runs through the film regarding order versus anarchy... yet there is little example of anarchy but also no false reprisal by monarchists against citizens. The treatment of war is tepid, but it just goes to show that Renoir was never comfortable representing hardened political positions.

tieman64 "Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle." - Martin Luther King Jr Like much of director Jean Renoir's work during this period, "La Marseillaise", which offers a romanticised retelling of the French Revolution of 1789, spends much of its time contrasting the lives of commoners with those of the aristocracy. Modern audiences will no doubt find this class baiting tedious, but such angry tracts were common in the lead up to, and wake of, the second world war (everyone from Renoir to John Huston to Rossellini to Pasolini to Pontecorvo etc). By the end of the 70s, cinema's fires of revolution, which Renoir lights here, and which were subsequently passed on from torch to torch for roughly four decades, would completely burn out.The film is divided into five chapters (The Court, The Civil and The Military Authorities, The Aristocrats, The Marseilles Locals, and The Ordinary Citizens), but essentially takes the structure of a grand march from Marseilles to Paris, a battalion of 500 volunteers arriving in time to capture The Tuileries Palace, leading to the publication of the Brunswick Manifesto and the overthrowing of Louis XVI's monarchy. With this march came "La Marseillaise", the song of the peasants, which later becomes France's national anthem.Renoir's direction is impeccable, the director adopting a naturalistic, semi-documentary tone. The film's well-choreographed battles and crowd scenes are particularly impressive. Today, its marriage of scope and sensitivity means "La Marseillaise" is still the best film to directly document the French Revolution. Martin Scorsese calls it "one of the finest and richest historical films ever made", and would borrow from it heavily for his stylish but strangely vapid pulp-revolutionary movie, "Gangs of New York".Renoir himself considered "La Marseillaise" one of his favourite films. Fittingly, it was partially sponsored by the Popular Front government of France (a coalition of leftists in power at the time) and was also financially backed by the French trade unions and the public.In terms of flaws, the film fails to get us to actually "care" about the revolution, has too much speechifying during its first hour (it eventually becomes quite stirring) and possess a brand of 1930s melodrama which modern audiences will no doubt turn their noses up to. Ironically, the most touching scene in the film is of a tortured King Louis XVI surrendering his power to the National Assembly. Visconti would be proud.What dates the film most, though, is the fact that we now firmly live in post-revolutionary times. Renoir rallies against aristocrats and their crimes against humanity, he champions for the revolution as a call to the rights of man, he reminds citizens to always be vigilant in defending liberty against tyranny, he advocates against both monarchy and nationalism, he demands that commoners be given an equal voice in government...bunch such things have a quaint, almost naive tinge nowadays.In our era of "diversity", "devolved power", "anticentralizen", "digitized capitalism", "mobilized local creativity and self organisation", there is simply no head to strike. Revolution is an art. It is an art of realising and "seizing the moment". Today, in which context is near impossible, in which moments and time itself seem increasingly fleeting, in which "culture" is one of continuous flux (or rather, the continuous rapid movement of commodities, which creates the illusion of change, of progress) and perpetual confusion, traditional revolution, as Renoir sees here, seems impossible. This is what another French director, Robert Bresson, realised with "The Devil, Possibly", and what Godard spends his career wrestling with.8/10 – Worth one viewing.

OldAle1 Coming as it does between the much better-known and acclaimed La Grande illusion and La Bête humaine, it's not surprising that this epic story of the French Revolution told mostly from the point of view of several peasant and laboring-class men who find themselves (mostly uneasily) caught up in the events of the early part of the revolt would get glossed over by many film historians. And it's not quite on the level of those masterpieces nor of La Règle du jeu from the following year or for that matter most of Renoir's 40s and 50s output, but it's also hardly worthy of dismissal.The film begins in the countryside and the Mediterranean port city of Marseilles, as a middle-aged man is about to be tried (and presumably executed) for the killing of a pigeon on his lord's land. He instead escapes into the country, into the mountains, where he meets up with with other like-minded impoverished proto-rebels. Slowly over the course of the first half-hour the struggle takes on political tones rather than just the personal gripe of one man, and it is the genius of the film to keep slowly building to the inevitable climax of "The Nation" versus "The King" while never forgetting to regard participants also as individuals.By the middle of the film the royal family and nobles have begun to understand the dangers they face, or at least some have -- the king still ignores the growing strife -- and they begin to play a major role in the film. Interestingly, the prime revolutionaries themselves though mentioned never take the stage; the focus is always on the lowest and the highest members of society, with the intellectuals who fomented the events offstage. Renoir is, it seems, trying to tell us that events were inevitable, and the prime movers really aren't all that significant if we look at the lives of those who stood most to gain, or lose.The final battle sequences are impressively staged, the film as a whole is strikingly well-acted and pretty seamless for all its shifting of focus between the oblivious king and his progressively angrier subjects. Particular acting honors would go to Edmond Ardisson as Bomier, whose growing beginnings of an understanding that revolution is not merely about him, but about the whole world around him are very moving. Pierre Renoir as Louis XVI manages to be foolish, brutal, and sympathetic by turns.