Resnais at Film Forum: Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime

Claude Ridder is not your typical time-traveling hero, but he was a fitting protagonist for Alain Resnais, the late surrealist filmmaker, who was often associated with the French New Wave, despite never fully identifying with the movement. In fact, Resnais’s take on time-travel film could represent the ultimate Nouvelle Vague film, because of its radically fractured approach to time. After consenting to serve as a human guinea pig in a time-traveling experiment, Ridder finds himself uncontrollably reliving brief snippets of his life in Resnais’s Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime (I Love You, I Love You), which is definitely worth re-watching in honor of the filmmaker’s recent centennial.

Ridder is a pitiable fellow in many ways. He still works as a shipping clerk at a Parisian publishing house, due to his chronic lack of ambition. Ridder also just survived a suicide attempt. Rather symbolically, he tried to shoot himself through the heart. Yet, his rather cavalier attitude towards life is what attracts the Crispel Research Center.

As the various blandly bureaucratic scientists explain to Ridder, they successfully sent mice back in time for one minute and then returned them safely. Of course, mice cannot discuss the experience, so they wish to recruit him to be their first human test subject. Ridder does not have any good reason to decline, so he agrees.

Much to everyone’s alarm, something goes wrong with the process this time. Ridder keeps randomly “quantum leaping” into past episodes of his life, many of which involve his troubled relationship with Catrine, who struggled with depression until her early demise. At various times, Resnais leads the audience to suspect something definitely transpired between them that contributed to her death and his suicide attempt.

Resnais’s 1968 film is often considered a source of inspiration for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but it is worth noting Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime also predates Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five and the subsequent George Roy Hill film adaptation. It certainly constitutes a fractured narrative, by any standard or measure. As Ridder endures the shuffle-play of his sad history for viewers to watch, each jump gets shorter, with surreal imagery starting to intrude into what had appeared to be an otherwise mundane existence.

Arguably, Resnais’s narrative approach was considerably ahead of the other genre films of its era. However, the scenes in the Crispel Center have a cold, sterile vibe reminiscent of classic 1960s science fiction films like Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville and Dr. Heywood Broun’s early sequences in 2001: A Space Odyssey. That coldness is similarly reflected in the characters, especially Ridder, who is standoffish and often rather self-sabotaging. Likewise, Catrine is usually moody and distant—or at least that is how he remembers her.

Resnais demands the audience’s full attention, by revisiting key incidents from different perspectives, at slightly earlier or later time-frames. It might look repetitive, but there are nuances to pick up on. Ultimately, when it all comes together, it lands with devastating emotional force.

NYFF ’14: Hiroshima Mon Amour

In the late 1950s, Japan was still digging out from the devastation of WWII, while France was struggling with the lingering guilt and shame of the German occupation. A man and a woman representing their respective national psyches will come together in one of the greatest cinematic one night stands to ever carryover into the next morning. “He” and “She” (or rather “Lui” and “Elle”) find brief solace in each other’s arms during Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (trailer here), which screens tomorrow as a revival selection of the 52^nd New York Film Festival, in advance of its theatrical re-release next Friday.

She is a French actress who has been shooting a so-called peace film in Hiroshima. He is a Japanese architect, whose wife is usually out of town for extended periods of time. They are both attracted and lonely, on a deeply profound level, so things take their course. However, matters get rather complicated during the afterglow of passion. Despite his apparent contempt for her peacenikery, He has a hard time letting go. She is more inclined to make a clean break, yet she is clearly conflicted. They are both haunted by the past, but her ghosts are especially thorny, rooted in the morally ambiguous era of the National Socialist occupation.

HMA was largely shot in Japan, but it is one of the truly defining films of the French Nouvelle Vague. The long opening sequence plays out like an avant-garde documentary, contrasting newsreel-like images of Hiroshima survivors and the memorial museum with the refrains of an apparent lovers’ quarrel, albeit a rather politicized one: “You saw nothing in Hiroshima, nothing. I saw everything in Hiroshima, everything.”

Eventually, Resnais shows the lovers intertwined, generating eroticism, while also evoking the images and textures of the tragically fused bodies of the Hiroshima atomic blast area or Pompeii. Over fifty years later, HMA is still aesthetically bold, yet somehow Resnais’s radical stylistic shifts are never jarring, rather feeling like they are part of a cohesive whole. It also has a powerful sense of place. By the time it ends, viewers will feel they know Her severely appointed modernist hotel better than their own apartments.

As the lovers rouse themselves, HMA almost segues into film noir, following their impossible courtship through a series of late night bars and deserted streets. It all looks eerily beautiful thanks to Michio Takahashi’s arresting black-and-white cinematography. Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada also look like they were chiseled out of Roman statuary marble expressly for this film. They develop some scorching hot chemistry, but also dramatically convey the persistent pain they continue to bear inside. Indeed, HMA is a brutally realistic depiction of the push-me-pull-me dynamic. He and She are trying to use each other to forget, but they perversely spur each other to remember with uncomfortable clarity.

Arguably, you could not make HMA as is, in this day and age. Even though Hiroshima is still acceptable fodder for an anti-nuclear message, the concerted efforts to woe the gatekeepers responsible for Chinese film import quotas would probably demand equal time for Japanese atrocities in Nanjing. Honestly, there are only so many guilt trips one can take in a single film. Fortunately, there are many ways to relate to HMA beyond its anti-nuclear raison d’être. In fact, it is one of the great ships-passing-in-the-night films of all time. Highly recommended for patrons of French and Japanese cinema, the newly restored Hiroshima Mon Amour screens tomorrow (10/10) at the Walter Reade, as part of this year’s NYFF, with a proper theatrical release to commence next Friday (10/17) at Film Forum downtown and the Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center uptown.

NYFF ’14: Life of Riley

George Riley is dying, but don’t worry, you will not get too attached to the old playboy. In fact, the title character never appears in Alan Ayckbourn’s play, but we hear plenty about him from his friends. It is exactly the sort of sly theatrical device that would appeal to the late great Alain Resnais. For his final film Resnais went back to the Ayckbourn well a third time, adapting Life of Riley (trailer here), which screens as a Main Slate selection of the 52^nd New York Film Festival.

Colin and Kathryn are rehearsing for their roles the latest production of their amateur theatrical company (Ayckbourn’s Relatively Speaking, naturally enough), but he is clearly preoccupied. Kathryn quickly extracts the truth from her doctor husband: their beloved friend Riley has less than a year to live. In violation of his professional ethics, the couple discusses his condition with their mutual friends, Jack and Tamara, deciding the play is the thing to keep Riley’s spirits up.

They also resolve to broker some sort of rapprochement with his estranged wife Monica, who has taken up with Simeon, a considerably older gentleman farmer. Despite their history together, Monica is not sure she can handle a reunion with George. Yet, she suddenly agrees to comfort her not quite ex-husband in his final hours, when it becomes clear Kathryn and Tamara might harbor eleventh hour romantic interests in Ayckbourn’s absent character.

Indeed, it all sounds like the stuff of midsummer French farce—and French it is indeed, even though Resnais retains the English trappings and Yorkshire country setting. He emphasizes the theatricality of it all with conspicuous fabric backdrops that look deliberately stagey, but give the film a rich, warm vibe thanks to the bold saturated colors. The cast of Resnais regulars hold up quite well in this slightly surreal environment, embracing their characters’ broad bourgeoisie anxieties. While everyone projects to the back row, so to speak, Sandrine Kiberlain and Hippolyte Girardot still manage to really connect on an emotional level, as Monica and Colin, respectively.

Of course, verisimilitude was never an obsessive preoccupation for Resnais, who throws it completely out the window in Life of Riley. Instead, he offers us the elegant illustrated transitions sketched by French cartoonist Blutch and X-Files composer Mark Snow’s uncharacteristically nostalgic soundtrack. There is even an apparent tip of the hat to Caddyshack (in did-I-just-see-that moments nearly as random as Wild Grass’s closing scene). In short, Resnais was not long for the world, but he was still having fun.

Indeed, that is the key to understanding Riley. On paper, the masterful You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet would seem to be the perfect career capstone, given its elegiac tone and its pseudo-resurrection made possible through the power of art. However, like George Riley, Resnais went out on his terms, having one last romp, damning the expectations of others. The result may not be a great film, like the late career masterwork YASNY, but it is a good film, which is always a welcome thing.

Even if Life of Riley is not Resnais’s greatest film, it might be perfectly representative of the auteur’s motifs and strategies. Regardless, it is appealingly wry and sophisticated. Recommended for fans of Resnais and Ayckbourn, Life of Riley screens this Friday (10/10) at the Walter Reade and Saturday (10/11) at the Beale, as part of this year’s NYFF.

You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet: Resnais Multiply Adapts Anouilh

Can a play from the 1940’s, based on classical mythology, still speak to contemporary audiences?  Alain Resnais will answer in the affirmative.  As a consummate cinematic game-player, he naturally stacks the deck, casting a who’s who of French thespians in his meta-adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice.  Regardless, the star-crossed love still resonates in You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Orpheus and Eurydice supply the back bone of YASNY, but the framing device incorporates Anouilh’s Cher Antoine ou l’amour Rate.  Playing themselves, the leading lights of French stage and screen are summoned to a memorial for their dear departed friend, playwright Antoine d’Anthac.  As part of the ceremony, they are to watch a video of his/Anouilh’s Eurydice, to determine whether the avant-garde revival is worth staging.  It is a work they are all familiar with, having each appeared in previous productions.  Watching the screen, they get caught up in the story and their own memories and begin to act out Eurydice in concert with the recorded rehearsal.

Cast members overlap and echo each other, but Resnais always maintains the integrity of Eurydice’s storyline.  It all sounds very post-modern, but it is really a case of the narrative overpowering its meta-conceits rather than being defined by them.

Of course, it is hard to go wrong with YASNY’s cast.  While Resnais has three sets of Orpheus and Eurydice at his disposal, he clearly favors Pierre Arditi and Sabine Azéma (two of his longtime collaborators), with good reason.  Watching this couple on the late side of middle age portraying the doomed young lovers is eerily moving.  Their experienced faces seem to amplify the tragedy rather than distract from it.  Nonetheless, Anne Consigny’s Eurydice is exquisitely brittle and dignified, overshadowing the aloof Lambert Wilson.

Former Bond villain Mathieu Amalric exudes a deliciously Mephistophelean vibe while maintaining the moral ambiguity of Monsieur Henri, death’s avatar, a role he mostly has to himself.  Michel Piccoli nicely anchors the film with his warm gravitas, ostensibly revisiting the role of Orpheus’s father, while leading the cheering section within the elite audience.  In addition to playing d’Anthac with eccentric flair, Denis Podalydès (from the Comédie Française) was recruited to direct the hipster Eurydice video segments, further complicating notions of what the film is and who is its author.  It is Anouilh’s Eurydice, as well as d’Anthac’s, but it is also partially Cher Antoine, mostly reconceived by Resnais, but also shaped by Podalydès.

The key point is it is all good.  With its cast members handing off their batons like relay runners, YASNY’s affection for the theater’s passion and artifice becomes infectious.  Featuring music by X-Files composer Mark Snow and Eric Gautier’s richly noir-ish cinematography, it is an unusually elegant film.  Cerebral yet strangely poignant, the highly recommended You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet opens this Friday (6/7) in New York at the Quad Cinema.

The Gamesmanship of Alain Resnais: Wild Grass

Georges Palet is a name of infamy. Or so he claims, but Palet is not a trustworthy narrator. Parsing fact from Palet’s fictions is a tricky business, as is establishing any sense of truth whatsoever in Alain Resnais’s Wild Grass (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Palet might be a scandalous figure with a checkered, perhaps even criminal past. Yet nobody besides Palet seems to see him in that light, except maybe his twenty-something son. Of course, that might just be the surliness of youth. Still, for Palet it appears to be reality, which is why the chance discovery of a stolen wallet causes him great anxiety, lest suspicion fall on him.

While debating his next step, Palet studies the contents of the wallet, developing a strange fixation on the owner, Dr. Marguerite Muir, a dentist with her pilot’s license. With some trepidation, Palet turns the wallet over to the police, who do not appear particularly impressed that he is the Georges Palet (but to be fair, they are somewhat distracted at the time). Eventually, Muir calls Palet to thank him, but when she fails to live up to his expectations, Palet tells her so, plainly and repeatedly. Suddenly, Palet starts exhibiting stalker-like behavior, repeating what he calls his past mistakes. And then Resnais gives the film a series of dramatic twists.

In 2009, Grass was among the most talked about pictures at both Cannes and the New York Film Festival. It could well rank alongside Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad in terms of significance within his filmography and it will be impossible to ignore for anyone seriously studying his work. What begins as a meditation on the randomness of life becomes an object lesson in the slipperiness of truth. However, Resnais’s approach to the story (based on a novel by Christian Gailly) is largely linear and completely accessible, if thoroughly maddening.

Regardless of viewers’ response to Resnais’s sly gamesmanship, Grass is an absolutely masterful piece of filmmaking. Like a magician, Resnais essentially tells the audience what he will do, then through misdirection and sleight of hand, leaves us stunned when the film ends exactly where he hinted it would. With a jarringly eccentric conclusion sure to baffle most and annoy many, Resnais flat out tells the audience they just got served.

Unlike most postmodern films attempting to undermine narrative structures and problematize notions of reality, Grass is a richly crafted film. Resnais stylishly superimposes dramatically rendered fantasies and seamlessly integrates Palet’s wildly unreliable interior monologues. Eric Gautier’s cinematography is sumptuously moody, with the crime jazz-influenced soundtrack composed by Mark Snow (best known for his work on the X-Files) further heightening the noir atmosphere.

Like Resnais, André Dussollier also keeps the audience utterly off balance with his performance as the quite possibly unbalanced Palet. While maintaining complete consistency of character, Dussollier makes it impossible to judge if he is sympathetic, deluded, dangerous, or a bizarre combination of the three. Amongst the accomplished supporting cast, Mathieu Almaric shows a welcomed comedic flair as police officer Bernard de Bordeaux. Unfortunately, Resnais’s characters are a largely unsympathetic lot, which makes the strange time spent with them something less than a complete enchantment.

Those who get headaches when they hear terms like “playful postmodern subversion” will probably get exasperated with Grass. Those who enjoy coy cinematic puzzles will be thoroughly charmed. It is a very stylish film that enjoys its deceptions for their own sake. Worth seeing just to debate afterwards, it opens this Friday (6/25) at the Lincoln Plaza and Quad Cinemas.

NYFF ’09: Wild Grass

Georges Palet is a name of infamy. Or so he claims, but Palet is not a trustworthy character. Parsing fact from Palet’s fabulations is a tricky business, as is establishing any sense of truth at all in Alain Resnais’s Wild Grass, the opening night film of the 2009 New York Film Festival.

Palet might be a scandalous figure with a checkered, perhaps even criminal past. Yet evidently nobody besides Palet seems to see him in that light, except maybe his twenty-something son. Of course, that might just be the surliness of youth. Still, for Palet it appears to be reality, which is why the chance discovery of a stolen wallet causes him great anxiety.

While debating his next step, Palet studies the contents of the wallet, developing a strange fixation on the owner, Dr. Marguerite Muir, a dentist with her pilot’s license. With some trepidation, Palet turns the wallet over to the police, who do not appear particularly impressed that he is the Georges Palet (but they are somewhat distracted at the time). Eventually, Muir calls Palet to thank him, but when she fails to live up to his expectations, Palet tells her so, repeatedly. Suddenly, Palet starts exhibiting stalker-like behavior, repeating what he calls past mistakes. And then Resnais gives the film a series of dramatic twists.

Grass will certainly be among the most talked about films of the festival. It could well rank alongside Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad in terms of significance within his filmography, and will be impossible for anyone seriously studying his work to ignore. What begins as a meditation on the randomness of life becomes an object lesson in the slipperiness of truth. However, Resnais’s approach to the story (based on a novel by Christian Gailly) is largely linear and completely accessible.

Regardless of viewers’ response to Resnais’s sly gamesmanship, Grass is an absolutely masterful piece of filmmaking. Like a magician, Resnais essentially tells the audience what he will do, then through misdirection and sleight of hand, leaves us stunned when the film ends where he hinted it would. With a jarringly eccentric conclusion sure to baffle many, Resnais flat out tells the audience we just got served.

Unlike most postmodern films attempting to undermine narrative structures and problematize notions of reality, Grass is a richly crafted film. Resnais stylishly superimposes dramatically rendered fantasies and seamlessly integrates Palet’s wildly unreliable interior monologues. Eric Gautier’s cinematography is sumptuously moody, with the crime jazz-influenced soundtrack composed by Mark Snow (best known for his work on the X-Files) further heightening the noir atmosphere.

Like Resnais, Andre Dussollier also keeps the audience utterly off balance with his performance as the quite possibly unbalanced Palet. While maintaining complete consistency of character, Dussollier makes it impossible to judge if he is sympathetic, deluded, dangerous, or a bizarre combination of the three. Grass notably also reunites three members of the cast of Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale, including Mathieu Almaric, who shows a real comedic flair as police officer Bernard de Bordeaux.

Those who get headaches when they hear terms like “playful postmodern subversion” will probably get exasperated with Grass. Those who enjoy coy cinematic puzzles will be thoroughly charmed. It is a very stylish film that enjoys its deceptions for their own sake. The NYFF continues through October 11th, with Main Slate selections screening at Alice Tully Hall.