[In La Guerre est finie, we] are no longer concerned with the pretentious counterpoint of Love and the Bomb, Past and Present, Illusion and Reality, Society and the Individual, etc. We are obsessed instead with the doubts of Diego, the fears of Diego, the hopes of Diego, the instincts of Diego, even the fantasies of Diego….

For Resnais, it is enough to celebrate remembrance and mourn forgetfulness as fragments of personality and politics disintegrate in the void of time…. Cinema, like life, is a process of creating memories for the future. Resnais has always drawn on the past without paying for the future. His cinema has been hauntingly beautiful if dramatically improvident in its ghostliness. His characters have been paralyzed by the sheer pastness of their sensibilities…. Diego has become a hero of prudence and inaction. He has shown what it is to be a man without the...