je t’aime, je t’aime (w&d resnais, w. jacques sternberg)

Je t’Aime, Je t’Aime is a remarkable and brilliantly conceived movie. A man is put into a time capsule in an experiment to travel back in time. He is on a beach on the South of France. Then he jumps into another scene from his past life. The experiment isn’t working as it should. The scientists are puzzled. The man’s life is relived as fragments, cut up, 30 second clips. He was in love with a woman who wasn’t happy. They went to Glasgow. He might have killed her. He wants to kill himself. He tells a friend about it. She doesn’t believe him. She does believe him. The film assembles fragment after fragment, piecing them together in a way that makes no linear sense, but gradually the viewer, and the man, the subject of the experiment, begin to discern a pattern, a shape. He’s back on the beach. He’s in a restaurant. We have to play catch up. Time is eddying and flying, forwards and backwards. All the time it is also shaped by the passing of real time, which is the time of the movie and the time of the experiment. Eventually the scientists give up. They can’t get him to come back. He’s on a beach. He’s chatting to his lover. He’s waiting for a tram. He’s gone.

The film is Borgesian in the extreme and there are echoes of elements of Performance, another film from the time which references Borges, in the cut-up nature of reality they both depict. It is a masterpiece of editing and narrative construction. The closest popular cinema has come to Resnais’ film is Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, which may or may not have been influenced by Je t’Aime, Je t’Aime. It is a film which takes us to the heart of the beast, as it explores and challenges the way in which time functions, reminding us that time and its passing are the cornerstone of the cinematic experience.