stavisky (d. alain resnais, w. jorge semprún)

Resnais had a curious career. From the avant-garde to this somewhat run of the mill version of what might have been a remarkable tale. You can understand the attraction of the story, one that he perhaps learnt about as a kid. Stavisky was a maverick Ukrainian born near Kiev who immigrated to France and built himself up as an impresario. He dabbled in the entertainment business as well as the bond market, where he made fraudulent profits which lead to his eventual demise in spite of having bribed a fair quantity of politicians. It’s a jazz age story set in Paris and Biarritz with an expensive costume budget and music by Sondheim, but besides these technical elements and Belmondo’s grandstanding, this feels like a film which is searching for its raison d’être. The narrative, told in part via flashback, has a heavy handed feel, and the film starts to sag under the weight of the menagerie of French character actors who traipse across the screen. It’s a long way from the formal playfulness of the director’s early work. 

on connais la chanson (d resnais, w. agnès jaoui & jean-pierre bacri)

The film’s titles are composed of fetching little cartoons of the characters we are about to meet. Then there is one of Dennis Potter, who had recently died, and the note that the film is a tribute to him. The film’s use of music is a clear homage to Potter, but In so many ways other ways On Connais La Chanson feels nothing like a Potter project. Resnais’ trick in the film is that the cast of his romantic comedy will suddenly start lip synching to popular French songs, not one of which I recognised. This intervention feels at times extremely effective and at other times laboured. Sometimes it’s expositional and at other times it offers a striking insight into a character’s mind. All in all the film feels like an intellectual exercise with little of the pathos Potter managed to wring from his use of popular music. Having said which, The Singing Detective and Brimstone and Treacle and Pennies from Heaven felt, in my memory at least, like punchier, more challenging pieces. On Connais La Chanson is beguilingly French, a soft-edged Parisian comedy of thwarted passion and small betrayals. All the characters are white, middle class, and potentially, one imagines if one was French, irritating. This is the same world that La Haine and early Gaspar Noe emerged from. It’s a world where mobile phones are just starting to be a thing, where property development (a theme also picked up in Paris, 13 Arrondissement) is starting to change the Parisian landscape. Resnais touches on these themes, but they are couched within a doggedly bourgeois narrative, which gives the film a slightly clumsy apolitical air. For all its formal playfulness, we are a long way from Marienbad and Hiroshima. 

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.

hiroshima mon amour (d. resnais, w. duras) & nuit et brouillard (d. resnais, w. cayrol)

There is a lot said and written and thought about this movie and if I’m honest I don’t feel as though I have much to add. I recognise its venerated status in the cannon but a few days after watching it it has merged in my mind into a single shot of Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada talking endlessly as they mosey through the Hiroshima night. It felt in many ways akin to another film that I struggle with, which is Linklater’s Before Sunrise (whilst recognising the influence is of course the other way round). Some films tiptoe the line between pretension and art and some films run the risk of falling into the abyss. Whilst the split Cortazarian narrative is a neat device, with Elle reliving her past in Nevers as she embraces the post-atomic, post-war era, it neither felt as mind-bending as anything Resnais achieved in Last Year at Marienbad, nor as challenging as Nuit et Broiullard, his devastating Holocaust short which was shown before HMA. The use of politics as a semiotic tool is fraught with danger and Resnais’ employment of Hiroshima, the city and the event, feels problematic. Would a filmmaker today get away with a mawkish love story between a Westerner and a Syrian set in Aleppo? We are nearly into Blier territory, and if anything it is the relative lack of confusion which left me cold in HMA. If the film had pushed its characters closer to the abyss, or maintained the cinematic language it adopts in the opening fifteen minutes, perhaps the semiotics of Hiroshima would not seem so ponderous, but it doesn’t and in the end it just feels immeasurably French. 

last year at marienbad (d. alain resnais, w. alain robbe-grillet)

This remains an astonishing, formally brilliant film. In spite of the archness of the narrative and setting, there’s an undercurrent of brutal humanity. Delphine Seyrig’s enigmatic posturing conceals the fact that this is a film about choices. The choices made in relationships which are pivotal, determining our fate: a relationship might be a stay in a luxury hotel or it might become a stay in prison. Like the film’s recurring motif, the game of Nic, which is always won by Seyrig’s husband, our capacity to determine our own fate is denied by the logic of a game we fail to understand. Someone else is always winning. In this sense there also appears to be a strong echo in Robbe-Grillet’s radical script of Beckett’s quiet nihilism. The characters are trapped in a Godotian conundrum, one whose logic the viewer can intuit without ever really understanding. This lends the film an interpretative ambiguity. Is the hotel heaven or the hell of a concentration camp or the decline and fall of Western Civilisation? Watching the film for the first time in twenty five years, (when Mr C and I watched it on video in his Kilburn flat, a viewing which clearly influenced the Boat People), it resembles nothing so much as Jaramuschian zombie film, a far more complex and darker narrative than that director’s faded aristo opus, Only Lovers Left Alive. Marienbad has the prophetic power of a greek tragedy, no more so than in the director/ screenwriter’s use of the statue of a man and a woman poised on the brink of danger. In a more classical screeenwriting scenario, it might have been suggested that the interpretations of the statue not be articulated (who’s holding who back, what it really means, etc). However, here the novelist’s articulation works, precisely because it is not done to elucidate or clarify, but to further confuse. Words are part of the puzzle, a puzzle the viewer is constantly failing to solve, and the watching process is far more engaging for our failure to understand than it would be if we had a clear idea of what the film was trying to say. 

muriel (d alain resnais, w jean cayrol)

Somewhere in my head Muriel had acquired iconic status. I'm not quite sure why. There's a book of Truffaut's reviews I was given at the age of 17 which probably talked about it. (It's boxed up somewhere so I cannot check.) Maybe it's just the simplicity of the title. Maybe it's Resnais himself, the mysterious maestro of detached emotion who ended up being a devotee of Ayckbourn. A grand survivor from the heyday of Nouvelle Vague, still doing his idiosyncratic thing. You wonder if they still talk to one another, the survivors, him and Godard and Varda and a few others. Do they head to Cineworld to check out the latest Soderburgh and then have a few pints afterwards in a quiet bar, where maybe someone half-recognises them and comes over in a drunken haze, mistaking one for Truffaut or the other for Giscard D'Estaing?

I kind of hope so. Maybe, if they do, they spend the odd twenty minutes trying to work out what Muriel is really all about. I've rarely seen a film edited in a more unusual fashion. The first 45 minutes is given over entirely to a slightly stagey evening meeting between four people, including the worldly-wise Helene, played by Delphine Seyrig. Then the movie rattles through a whole dollop of plot with a string of three- second edits, which seemingly move everything forward to a new starting point. Which is the cue for the next wordy scene, before another fast forward. As though Resnais had discovered the art of the music video twenty years earlier, dispensed with the music and slotted these sequences into what at times does indeed feel like an Ayckbourn play.

The film's most arresting moment comes when it includes a five minute documentary-style passage, seemingly out of keeping with the remainder of its aesthetic, about the Algerian war. In fact this war haunts the film, with one character still affected by the abuses he witnessed there, and another falsely claiming to have served there. These strong, political themes are mixed with dry humour and melodrama. The whole concoction makes for a film which is frequently baffling and constantly wrong-foots the viewer. We never quite know what type of movie we're watching. It challenges our patience; which is not such a bad thing, but in a somewhat peculiar twist it does so through it's banality. Perhaps in the end it's what you would get if you were to blend Sartre's seaside tale, Nausea, with a dash of Ayckbourn and a soupcon of Battle of Algiers. One awaits the remake.