The criminally under-appreciated French director Alain Resnais is still cranking out complicated and elusive movies, puzzles of memory and emotion, at the age of 91. For that alone we should applaud. What will you be doing at that age? I’ll probably be watching Alain Resnais films that I’ve downloaded onto the hard drive installed in my brain.
Film Forum will screen a restored 35mm print of Resnais’s 1968 journey of the mind, “Je t’aime, je t’aime,” February 14-20. The film is in desperate need of reexamination, or really any kind of examination at all. Resnais is an international treasure (his newest film, “Life of Riley,” recently premiered at the Berlin Film Festival) with a staggering body of work. It’s one of the most brilliant in the history of cinema and it’s nearly impossible to easily see. Large chunks of his filmography have been obscure even to his most devoted fans (the Criterion Collection and others in the U.S. have slowly started to make his work more accessible), which makes every chance to see something from Resnais a major event.
Never released on DVD in this country, “Je t’aime je t’aime” stars Claude Rich as man selected to undergo a time travel experiment after a failed suicide attempt. But in the process something goes wrong, and the patient’s memories become fragmented, unspooling in bits and pieces, out of order, sometimes looping back again and again. In the process, we see a relationship come together and fall apart, and the tragic nature of what we’re watching isn’t clear until the final moments.
Or maybe it’s clear all along. Resnais is a master of making tightly constructed films that are deceptively nebulous — the montage is very important here — and “Je t’aime” is one of his most surreal. Moment to moment, we’re unclear of what we’re seeing even when it seems so simple, so plain. As the narrative continues to spin around like a zoetrope, a visit to the beach or a quiet conversation in bed acquires new meanings as the film progresses. It’s as much a love story, or a science-fiction story, as it is a story about storytelling itself, and continues on themes Resnais had developed in “Hiroshima Mon Amour” and “Last Year at Marienbad” (influenced by the work of nouveau roman writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet) — life as it is lived and perceived is not a chain of events; rather, it’s like shattered glass. We’re left to put the pieces back together.
