Alain Resnais

I was sad to hear of the death of director Alain Resnais last week.  What can you say about a director who began directing films in the late 1940's, and whose penultimate film, made when he was 90 years old, was entitled (in the English translation) "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet".   It seemed like a good time to catch up on some of the films that I haven't seen, so I have been watching Resnais all week.  Here are a few thoughts...

Resnais's reputation rests primarily on his first two films, "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Last Year at Marienbad", films that came out at the time of the first films of Godard, Truffaut, etc.   He made films consistently after those films, but never with quite the same impact.  For me, the films of Resnais are all about narrative and time, and are fascinating all through his career.  His third film, "Muriel", is a fractured, disjunct narrative that takes place in the aftermath of the war of Algerian independence, with an austere and compelling modernist score by Hans Werner Henze.  I prefer it to the first two films.   I recently watched the 1990's fim, "Smoking/No Smoking", which features a complex, branching narrative, adapted from a set of plays by the English playwright Alan Ayckbourn.    The story follows to a conclusion, and then "rewinds" to an earlier moment, and with an "ou bien...", the story follows a different possible outcome. It proceeds to do this many times!   Here is a chart, found on the internet, which illuminates the structure of the film, with the various possible branches of the narrative:

Needless to say, this is not how they teach you to construct a screenplay in Hollywood.
The film has never been released on DVD in North America.  Resnais is also a lover of theatrical artifice; thus the film is made entirely in a studio, and all the parts are played by two actors (but without any fancy film effects).  But ultimately the film is very human, as we ponder the possible fates of all the characters; it almost feels more real to know of all the different permutations of fate.

Another film I saw recently was "Life Is a Bed of Roses" (the English translation of the title).  This film constantly shifts between three narratives; one is about a very rich madman around the time of World War I, who decides to build a some kind temple of happiness, and drugs his willing friends to reprogram their minds.  The second involves a hilarious educator's conference in contemporary times, taking place in the same building, with much discussion about the role of imagination in young children's education by badly misinformed educators.  The third seems to involve some imaginary fairy tale world, with painted on glass sets.    The other striking thing is that characters switch back and forth from talking to singing now and then.   It's not a musical, and the convention of characters bursting into song at song-worthy moments is not observed.   Rather, they just sometimes sing their lines instead of saying them.   Again, not a recipe for audience involvement.   The cast includes the late Cathy Berberian, known for her innovative singing in Luciano Berio's compositions.

The essential element in most of Resnais's films is a narrative paradox of some kind, "Last Year at Marienbad" being the most famous example.   People have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what is going on in that movie; I believe Resnais has somewhere said that it can't be explained.  Sometimes the paradox is overt, and at other times, you only realize the paradox when you think very carefully after you have seen the film.
(The contemporary Korean film director Hong Sang-soo works very much in the same vein; in one of his films we see the same story twice, once from the woman's point of view, and once from the man's.)