Alain Resnais > Everyone

Alain Resnais > Everyone
Better-Than Lists
by Armond White

2007:
Private Fears in Public Places > Southland Tales
Alain Resnais confirms his Old Master status with dreamlike interplay of Parisians anomie. Richard Kelly’s futuristic satire feels shoddy and looks crappy.

2010:
Wild Grass > The Social Network 
Alain Resnais concocted one of the year’s two best films with a constantly inventive fantasia on our common idiosyncrasynot polarized like the high-tech bullying that David Fincher burnishes and sentimentalizes.

2013:
You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet > Computer Chess
Alain Resnais’ continually astonishing, estheticized exploration of memory and emotion hits a new theatrical-cinema-dream peak that embarrasses Andrew Bujalski’s intentional (yet unintentionally crude) denial of cinema as an esthetic pleasure.

Master Perspective

Master Perspective
Private Fears in Public Places
by Armond White

Anyone impressed by the gimmicky thriller, Memento, was probably ignorant of Alain Resnais, the filmmaker whose innovations with film form and experiments with time were trivialized by Memento’s flashback-in-reverse game. With such monumental 1960s films as Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad and Muriel, Resnais innovated the most confounding yet dazzling kinds of narrative. Those movies—all masterworks—are still intriguing, still amazing because they suggest inexhaustible possibilities for cinema as a new art form. Simply put: Resnais’ movies constructed images to represent cogitation, memory and imagination. Though easily copied, they were never matched; only traduced by movies like Memento, The Matrix and Stranger than Fiction—or unacknowledged by our timid and conventional contemporary film culture.

So it’s practically an aesthetic revival—and a career revival—to have Resnais’ 1964 Muriel playing Midtown at the Museum of Modern Art while downtown, the IFC center features the U.S. premiere of his latest film, Private Fears in Public Places. This matters because Resnais is the most influential yet least familiar filmmaker from that period Philip Lopate called the “heroic age of moviegoing.” Watching Private Fears gives one that ’60s heroic feeling due to Resnais’ still-challenging emphasis on form. This highly stylized French version of Alan Ayckbourn’s English stage play proves how well cinematic form can be used to visualize spiritual connections between disparate people. In this case, lovelorn Parisians whose lives intersect and parallel.

From the first wide shot of a cityscape in winter, Resnais begins his typically elegant investigation of a space then interweaves portrayals—performances—of lives in time. Lambert Wilson and Laura Morante are a couple who delay their break-up by searching for a new apartment. Realtor Andre Dusollier becomes fascinated by risqué home videos loaned to him by his secretary, Sabine Azema, who moonlights as home care nurse to the bedridden father of a lonely bachelor (Claude Rich). These life stories are reflected/connected when Wilson answers a personal ad from Isabelle Carre, the realtor’s sister. This desperate encounter—like Wilson’s relationship with his baleful, watchful bartender (Pierre Arditi)—refines the film’s theme of anxious communication. Private Fears in Public Places is a surprisingly apt substitute for the original French title Coeurs since it spells out how, for Resnais, a film is much more than its plot but can offer a kaleidoscopic shifting of people, places, experiences. 

Cinematographer Eric Gautier’s images are bright, almost glaceéd and Herve de Luze’s editing pace matches the visual motif of a drifting snowfall. In addition to being a stone-serious experimenter, Resnais is always an exquisite craftsman. The film’s look of Christmassy enchantment emphasizes the story’s theatricality, yet this isn’t merely what used to be called “filmed theater.” There’s no hint of a proscenium in Resnais’ vision. It is most like Robert Altman’s miraculous theatrical films of the 1980s—especially Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Fool for Love, the most visually extravagant of Altman’s hybrid movies. Altman realized a relationship between language and image that was so seamless it appeared chimerical; critics have yet to credit its radicalism. But changing audience perspective on cinema and life is part of Resnais’ intent. His theater films (starting with Melo in 1986) distilled his once kinetic style, but now he returns to the audacious sumptuousness of Marienbad. Like Altman’s Beyond Therapy (a Broadway comedy that Altman mischievously filmed in Paris), Resnais ironically transforms Ayckbourn’s quintessentially British play into a French love roundelay, achieving an intellectual investigation of farce for its emotional acuity.

Resnais’ soulful depth often went unappreciated due to such high-modernist extremes as in the magnificent Marienbad. The sheer pleasure of the diaphanous transitions and color dissolves in Private Fears in Public Places and conveys the transcendent empathy that has always been part of Resnais’ genius. In Muriel, the rapid-fire montage of separate characters’ experiences implied a sense of existential simultaneity. Resnais also kept one mindful of critic Gregory Solman’s seminal Film Comment essay on Resnais called memory’s grip on consciousness—a unique insight into the morality of modern experience. His new film does this in astonishingly beautiful ways, featuring aching, eccentric characterizations like Wilson and Azema’s that are revelatory. Resnais even diagrams alienation in the overhead shot of Wilson and his soon-to-be ex touring an apartment—a scene Brian DePalma might envy for turning rich abstraction into an art tease. But Resnais’ tease surpasses Memento’s hipster gimmick because the great abstractionist is not afraid of showing heart. 

A Year Without Altman

A Year Without Altman
by Armond White

“Nothing’s been quite right since Altman the Lion died.” That’s my paraphrase of Ellen Burstyn’s heartfelt speech in The Last Picture Show. Following Robert Altman’s death just over a year ago, American movies spiraled downward so noticeably that any sentient moviegoer must wonder whether there was a direct connection. A pall overshadowed 2007 cinema. Too often, I found myself scribbling a singular phrase in my reviewer’s notepad: I MISS ALTMAN. 

With vehement pressure, those words creased the next notebook pages, especially at screenings of Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, I’m Not There, Margot at the Wedding and Juno—front-runners for worst films of the year. They represent cultural embarrassment, aesthetic failure and rot—a decline sadder than trash like Color Me Kubrick, Music & Lyrics and The Kingdom. Through directors Todd Haynes, Noah Baumbach and Jason Reitman, American movies’ potential collapsed into mediocrity, elitism, narcisscism and ineptitude. 

As for Sidney Lumet’s film, it was especially dismaying since Lumet was one of the few American directors to attend the Altman memorial program at the Majestic Theater last January. Arthur Penn, Jim Jarmusch and Alan Rudolph were the only other New York-based directors who, along with Lumet, demonstrably respected the significance of Altman’s passing. However, Lumet’s newest film descended into fashionable indie nihilism, like an elder statesman desperately putting on Goth make-up just to seem hip. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead was one of the low points of indie-filmmaking, the movement of individual striving that Altman pioneered before it had a quotable Arts & Leisure tag.

Every significant development in contemporary American movies was anticipated—and defined—by Altman masterworks from the NASA space opera Countdown to his final show-business epic A Prairie Home Companion. He even showed how to make a big budget studio movie your own way with the still avant-garde Popeye. Having laid out the parameters of what original and independent filmmaking could be, it was disheartening to see so many directors in 2007 forget Altman’s example. And the ultimate disgrace seemed to come when the Independent Feature Project rushed into the annual, craven awards derby and, before the year was even over, announced that they had cooked-up a Best Ensemble Acting Award and slapped Altman’s name on it. They dirtied it further by giving the prize to the dubious ensemble of I’m Not There—not an example of life-like behavior and interaction or individual performer’s ingenuity like the  mix of real and fictional musicians in Altman’s 1975 Nashville (the movie of movies), but badly-cast tabloid-star names, all isolated from each other, involved in an egghead’s narcissistic circus. I’m glad I wasn’t there.

But having dutifully sat through most of the year’s releases, I saw a few Altman-worthy achievements, some halfway-there signs of ambition and yet far more too many films that worked toward killing the movie-going urge. A podcast of the New York Times’ two lead film critics discussing the movie year betrayed the duo chortling, “It was a good year to be evil Americans.” This attitude, so redolent of liberal media bias (the Borat scorn one hoped had played out) showed the prominence of the anti-Bush/anti-American depression that even Altman had expressed to the media yet never tarnished the rich understanding and broad compassion of his movies. The real villain in A Prairie Home Companion wasn’t corporate capitalism but Death. 

Three of 2007’s best films dramatized similar wisdom:

Eytan Fox’s The Bubble which used homophobia as a metaphor for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and homophilia as the best hope for its resolution; Fox entertwined militarism and soul like no film since Streamers. Alain Resnais’ Private Fears in Public Places, a graceful consideration of the sexual and spiritual tensions of modern urbanites; its diaphanous snowfall motif recalled McCabe & Mrs. Miller but only critic John Demetry recognized Resnais and Altman’s allusion to Joyce’s “The Dead.” 

And, perhaps best of all, Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, a family chronicle as class-specific as Cookie’s Fortune but whose distinct sensibility echoed Altman at his most vividly eccentric—The Long Goodbye, Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and M*A*S*H. 

Proof that critics forgot Altman’s contribution to human understanding and superb film craft was apparent in critics’ hostile revulsion to The Darjeeling Limited. They preferred the poisoned-family films by Lumet, Baumbach and Savages and Juno for sophomoric cleverness and cynicism. Recall the brothers in Vincent & Theo or Cookie’s Fortune’s sisters to see where Savages’ siblings ring false. Reflect upon the troubled teens of Kansas City and O.C. and Stiggs to realize Juno’s sickening contrivance. Altman’s artistry taught lucky filmgoers who enjoyed the range of his career to better understand themselves and their country. 

What you might call Altman’s patriotism went deeper than politics—a fact some miss about M*A*S*H, Jimmy Dean, Fool for Love and Kansas City but that McCabe, Nashville and Short Cuts should have made inarguable.This year the argument was waged—unsuccessfully—by Paul Thomas Anderson’s woeful There Will Be Blood. Although an Altman acolyte, Anderson seems clueless about the things that made Altman the premiere filmmaker of his era. Anderson imitated Altman’s sense of the secretiveness in American loners, but his vision is trendily jaded. His characters leapt from bogus conceit to madness, rarely attaining recognizable humanity like Altman’s characters who always seem to be in the bus seat, car seat, party, family or crowded room with you. To mistake There Will Be Blood for a genuine American historical epic—after Altman!—is ridiculous. While Anderson graciously dedicated this monstrosity to his hero, it’s less than Altman—and we—deserve.

Altman’s passing was more meaningful than Antonioni or Bergman’s in 2007. They were also giants but Altman, their contemporary, remained a vital cultural force to the end. Sadly, his very American heart was crushingly misunderstood by some—a Times obit continued to misread the ending of the 1992 The Player, missing Altman’s ironic, mortified shudder at the triumph of Hollywood jackals, perhaps to convince Times readers that everything was hunky-dory. This is why Burstyn’s Last Picture Show lament is a fitting eulogy—for Altman and 2007 movies.  

Beginning of the End

Beginning of the End
1962: New York Film Critics Circle
by Armond White

HOLLYWOOD PUBLICITY HAS popularly established 1939 as the great signpost of the studio system’s output (the year of Gone with the Wind,Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach and at least a dozen other memorable movies). But films of the ’39 classical era are rivaled by a year in the modernist era: 1962. It marked the highpoint of international, art-film exhibition as well as the beginning of the end of the old Hollywood system, all culminating in extraordinary but—up until now—overlooked riches.

As part of this year’s New York Film Critics Circle’s 75th anniversary celebration, the Brooklyn Academy of Music presents a series devoted to 1962—the only year in the group’s history without an awards roster. There had been a legendary newspaper strike at year’s end, causing the newspaper critics who made up the Circle’s membership (along with magazine critic members showing solidarity) to forfeit confirmation on what turned out to be a legendary movie year. Starting this week, with help from BAM’s curators Jake Perlin and Florence Almozini, the Circle fills in that history with a retrospective sampling of what makes 1962 matter.

David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia remains the best-known 1962 feature. It won the Academy Award and has since held on to its critical stature, repeatedly placing high on Sight and Sound magazine’s international critics poll each decade. But Lawrence of Arabia (showing Oct. 25 at BAM following a NYFCC panel discussion) was not the year’s only masterwork—although it certainly looms large.

American moviegoers have fond association with such ’62 releases as Sidney Lumet’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country, John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird, John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate and Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita.These major works from major directors easily distinguish 1962 and that list—a veritable canon of significant American pop art—is just for starters.

It’s time to recognize 1962 as a turning point in film culture—the happy coincidence of art and commerce that made it possible to appreciate movies as the ultimate, culminating art form for both elites and the general public. There’s no better example of Art and Pop cinema’s greatness than Anouk Aimee in Lola (Oct. 23), Jacques Demy’s debut feature that itself is a tribute to film history (Sternberg, Ophuls) and a defining statement of personal cinephilia. Equally wondrous was Vincente Minnelli’s 1962 two-fer: Two Weeks in Another Town and Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, both sumptuous, melodramatic commentaries—the former on Hollywood history, the latter on the world’s spiritual history.

Due to the usual methods of foreign-film distribution at that time, many of the great European and Asian filmmakers who were at the peak of their post-WWII creativity often came late to the attention of American audiences. Even work by an established director like Michelangelo Antonioni might take years to get an American theatrical release. This resulted in an abundance of art-film releases that allowed American audiences to catch up on the most important international cinema developments.

In 1962, Michelangelo Antonioni was among the many world-class filmmakers to have more than one movie premiere in the United States. Antonioni’s more recent L’Eclisse and La Notte (completing the trilogy that began with 1960’s L’Avventura) opened New York along with the late U.S. premiere of his 1957 Il Grido—all masterpieces.

An amazing number of leading art film directors had two movies make debuts in 1962.

Francois Truffaut: Jules and Jim, Shoot the Piano Player (Nov. 6 and 5, respectively) Buñuel: The Exterminating Angel,The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz. Kurosawa: Yojimbo,The Hidden Fortress. And a trio of greats were represented in the omnibus film Boccaccio ’70, showcasing short films by Luchino Visconti,Vittorio De Sica and Federico Fellini.

It was also the year of Alain Resnais’ art-film deluxe, Last Year at Marienbad—a definitive example of experimental modernism.

Resnais’ great challenge to filmmaking and film-watching convention was appropriate— could even seem natural—during a movie year already replete with individual vision and innovation. 1962’s highpoints of acting (Long Day’s Journey, Lawrence, Jules and Jim, Lolita, Ride the High Country), cinematography (Lawrence, Marienbad,The Longest Day) have never been surpassed.

The Critics Circle’s revival of 1962 movie art completes the film critic’s basic mandate to further open up public appreciation of the art form.This BAM series isn’t an exercise in nostalgia, as usually happens when people talk about 1939.The films on view range from Jerry Lewis’ The Errand Boy (Nov. 3) to Howard Hawks’ Hatari! (Nov. 4) and Agnes Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (Nov. 7) and Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Oct. 29). It’s a celebration of how popular art and high art can be indistinguishable. All these films (and the ’62 goes on) are worth knowing, enjoying and learning from. Future filmgoers might ask for more than 1962 offered, but they’re not likely to get it.

Weed Out the Weak

Weed Out the Weak
Wild Grass
by Armond White

ALAIN RESNAIS WAS never a pop filmmaker. His “fun” always comes with an intellectual prerequisite that bespeaks class while also evaluating it. His experiments with narrative form are also a kind of emotional rigor and it often expands into glorious empathy, as in his latest film Wild Grass—although the title Les Herbes Folles suggests “Crazy Grass,” which accounts for the personal eccentricity that structures a relationship between Georges (Andre Sussolier), who finds a
woman’s wallet, and the wallet’s owner, Marguerite (Sabine Azema).

From the first close-up of images of weeds in fields and then in cracks of pavement, Resnais dissolves to people on the street. He surveys human behavior as parallels of nature. Every image and transition conveys a thought (as when Georges seeks out Marguerite’s apartment and assorted address numbers appear in progressive sequence). These visual kinetics describe Resnais’ elegant, gliding, tracking camera style. Since Mélo (1986), he has favored theatrical/cinematic contrivance—non-realism—where only actors/people, feelings and thoughts are foremost, distilling life to “incidents,” as in the title of Christian Gailly’s source novel.

Wild Grass relays each incident of Georges and Marguerite’s tentative flirtation through such exquisite refinement—an amazing 360-degree slo-mo pan around Marguerite somehow maintains her anomie—that it embarrasses just about every other piece of filmmaking around. Ironically, in fraudulent experimenter Michael Winterbottom’s ugly, ugly The Killer Inside Me, Bill Pullman plays a lawyer who quotes novelist Jim Thompson’s pithy, “A weed is just a plant out of place,” which turns out to echo Resnais’ central concept. Despite being well-heeled, Resnais’ characters suffer social alienation: the pleasures of childhood and escape trouble their adult consciousness. Both Georges and Marguerite yearn for aviation, admiring airplanes for being able to lift them from gravity, and Resnais ingeniously demonstrates how it inhabits their every thought, gesture, hesitation and observation. (A droll touch: Marguerite’s wild red hair and full-length uniform resemble Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince.)

As a contemporary of the French New Wave, ResnaisThis is greater than the facile existentialism in Winterbottom’s vicious film-noir pastiche, which leaks any surprise simply by casting mealy-mouthed, squeaky-voiced Casey Affleck as psychopathic Texas cop Lou Ford. Winterbottom’s emphasis on Ford’s sexual aberration—he keeps copies of Freud and Havelock Ellis in his library— feels deceitful when no interest is shown in the sexual history of other characters or his victims. Winterbottom is in Mike Figgis mode, offering grossly violent filmnoir clichés, made of punching-bag-face make-up, gratuitous sex and Dark Knight nihilism—a crude contrast to sophisticated Resnais, where sexual desire is as airy yet deep as peak Ernst Lubitsch.

As a contemporary of the French New Wave, Resnais continues to innovate cinema. Not as a winking hipster like Winterbottom but as an aesthetic philosopher. Wild Grass’ “plot” is more psychological, not random, and reaches its own peak of sophistication when Marguerite tracks Georges to a movie theater and in the red glow of the Cinema’s neon sign reveal their secret fears and desires. That this unforgettable moment is not at all realistic gives it extraordinary power. Twenty-first-century audiences might liken its artifice to Eyes Wide Shut, In the Mood for Love and even Inglourious Basterds, but Resnais now has greatness at his fingertips and reduces those films to nitrate dust.

Luxury Outside the Box

Luxury Outside the Box
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet
by Armond White

Master filmmaker Alain Resnais promises You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet 

The Cinemascope frame stretches just wide enough to contain Alain Resnais’s abundant ideas about memory, imagination, love, art, death and life in You Ain‘t Seen Nothin’ Yet. Taking full measure of that vaudeville phrase (also the title of Andrew Sarris’ essay collection containing his superb monograph on Joseph von Sternberg), Resnais fulfills its promise in a high art exercise sumptuous enough for Sternberg. Resnais not only pokes fun at high art pretenses, part of the point of You Ain‘t Seen Nothin’ Yet is to explore them: When the associates of a theater director/playwright are summoned to attend his memorial, they are treated to his video-taped will which includes a new video performance by a troupe of younger actors performing his play Eurydice.

The mourners are an august bunch–eccentric, elegant artistes (Sabine Azema, Pierre Arditti, Anny Duperay, Lambert Wilson, Anne Consigny, Mathieu Almaric among them, all introduced in a clever credit/curtain call sequence). They’re already familiar with Eurydice, having performed it themselves over the years. But watching the video production sends each of them into personal reveries about the Orpheus myth and their own histories with each other and the commands of their god-like director/playwright. Resnais ingeniously captures the many layers of their memory, fantasy, desire and dread. Contrasting the richness of these intertwined personal projections and the spare video are just the beginning of Resnais’ caprice.

You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet moves into greatness when the mourners become fully engaged, both speaking and acting-out their pasts. We see their immediate feelings, as when Azema and Arditti, unable to face each other, reenact Orpheus and Eurydice’s underworld embrace. Azema has become Resnais’ loony redhead muse and Arditti represents his soulfulness. It’s a highpoint; going to the core of their experience, the myth is made urgent and intense. The palatial estate setting gives way to dreamy, stage-like spaces, even split-screen montages, across the screen’s expanse and the narrative goes inward–deeper into their spiritual and romantic consciousness.

 This stuff is certainly avant-garde (if that term can still be used for an artistic project that has always interested Resnais and already transformed cinema culture more than 50 years ago) but as the Orpheus reference suggests, it is also classical. The film’s basic strategies are fundamental to the way and the reason humans make art against time and how they respond to it. So it’s also show business which Jean Cocteau understood when he modernized myth in Orphee (1950). Resnais, as always, shows our cognitive processes only now, in his 90s, he’s sophisticated enough to play with his conceit’s cinematic theatricality.

That oxymoron is as fascinating as it is confounding. You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet exposes how banal most other pop narratives lose the mythological significance that has sustained human culture. Resnais highlights that significance, using the wide screen as the mind’s playhouse. His always sumptuous visual style takes on new luster with Eric Gautier, the great cinematographer who lights with pastel softness yet also uses the drama of deep chiaroscuro. Gautier and Resnais take thinking (and looking) outside the box to breathtaking levels of perception–luxurious perception. Colleague Stuart Lee of WNYN Channel 39 gave a definitive response to You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet: “It’s like a chinchilla coat–heavy to wear but beautiful.”

Resnais’s style used to be held against him but it’s part of what makes his cinematic project undeniable: His great themes Time and Thought receive their most esthetic treatment as in the graceful rhythms of Last Year at Marienbad, the speed of the edits in Muriel and the sheer gorgeousness of his recent renaissance (Private Fears in Public Places, Wild Grass and You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet). His intellectual and esthetic inquiries can seem remote, yet they’re also lavish. This film contemplates experience and oblivion, the artistic mythologizing of life and death, the ineffable and the sublime.

If you can take the cast of mourners’ grief and passion as a surreal demonstration of art imitating life, Resnais meets both Luis Bunuel and  Jacques Rivette at their own games. You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet ends with a Frank Sinatra recording as if to demonstrate that the richest art should also be the most accessible. No less playful than Resnais’ other jests here, it’s perfectly elegant and profound.

It's Resnais Time

It's Resnais Time 
Je t’aime, Je t’aime 
by Armond White

Movie history is short (106 years and counting) yet Alain Resnais’ special place in it is apparent in his 1968 filmJe t’aime, Je t’aime showing at Film Forum (Feb. 14 to 20).

More than 50 years since his feature-length debutHiroshima, Mon Amour, Resnais has continued an innovative, serious-art approach to movies, overcoming many different fads, failures and successes with such masterpieces as Last Year at Marienbad (1962) and the breathtakingly inventive Muriel (1964). Like Godard, Resnais has outlasted the peak, competitive years of European cinema, still playing with cinematic form and the intricacy of the mind and time.

Still on top, Resnais’ past three films Private Fears in Public Places (Coeurs), Wild Grass and You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet are the most daring, adventurous and entrancingly beautiful movies so far this century. Critic Stuart Lee memorably cited You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet as “Heavy to wear but gorgeous like a Chinchilla coat.” That assessment recognizes Resnais’ esthetic richness and emotional profundity–both still evident in the Film Desk’s reissue of Resnais’ light, ready-to-wear Je t’aime, Je t’aime.

Often described as science fiction, Je t’aime, Je t’aime (1968) is actually, in uniquely Resnaisian terms, an intellectual love story: A suicidal publisher Claude Ridder (Claude Rich) takes part in a scientific experiment to go back in time where he relieves his amatory past and inconsolable mourning for a lover Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot). Irredeemably geeky film critics insist on categorizing the artistry of Je t’aime, Je t’aime in familiar generic terms–as if it trod the same territory as Computer Chess or Shane Carruth’s Prime and Upsteam Color. Resnais looks higher: the scientists who submit Claude to experimentation as if he were a lab rat are too narrow-minded and boyish to see the romantic tragedy that obsesses his soul and memory.

Je t’aime, Je t’aime takes a droll approach to Resnais’s experiments with time and consciousness, as if teasing his own hyper seriousness. But the constant experimentation with montage has a purpose: kaleidoscopically viewing all sides of a sexually adventurous but morally perplexed man’s existential dilemma. As the pathologically resigned Claude lies sedated in the scientists’ plush cell (womblike interior and testicular exterior), his memory literally takes him back into his past but his spirit awakes. It’s one of those infernal French movies that can’t help examining masculine privilege and its regrets, which puts Je t’aime, Je t’aime into an entirely different genre than what superficial critics claim.

It is a tragic romance, droll yet touching in the same way that Rich’s performance goes from hollow to heartfelt (while Georges-Picot, alas, is but one Rich’s charming if typically sexy femme fatales). Recently, comparisons have linked this film to Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I prefer seeing connections with Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet (for the life span that flashes within the blink of an eye) and then Shane Carruth’s attempt to explore modern pathological thought in Upstream Color; Resnais is as aware of man’s guilt and self-loathing, but he doesn’t succumb to easy nihilism. The title Je t’aime, Je t’aime is like a Chinchilla coat: it clues viewers to the profound warmth–the essential human need–that is at the root of Resnais’ artistry. The drollery here replaces Resnais’ usual flash and luxe but spiritual confrontation gives it substance.