Film: The Alain Resnais Collection
Release date: 21st June 2010
Certificate: 18
Running time: 394 mins
Director: Alain Resnais
Starring: Gerard Depardieu, Fanny Ardant, Adolph Green, Pierre Arditi, Vittorio Gassman
Genre: Drama/Comedy
Studio: Artificial Eye
Format: DVD
Country: France/Brazil
Octogenarian French film-maker Alain Resnais has been directing films for over sixty years. Formerly friends with The Doors’ Jim Morrison and latterly with Alan Ayckbourn, his career has flirted with French New Wave and box office success but tailed off dramatically in the 1980s. Critical and commercial success were regained in 1993 with Smoking/No Smoking, but is it now time to reassess his eighties output?
The Alain Resnais Collection groups together Life Is A Bed Of Roses (1983), Love Unto Death (1984), Mélo (1986) and I Want To Go Home (1989) and offers a chance to revisit his tales of love, death and discovery.
Life Is A Bed Of Roses weaves three disparate stories together into a light-hearted musical. Beginning with the construction of a Temple of Happiness, and a bizarre social experiment by wealthy Michel Forbek (Ruggero Raimondi), the film then moves to a more modern setting where the same building has been re-invented as an educational establishment. Between these two plots is another more abstract story about a medieval jousting competition.
It’s never quite clear what the film is trying to say or why. The occasional inexplicable bursts of song add little – the tone of the film is whimsical enough without needing to resort to such a technique. The melding of the three stories doesn’t quite work – the Python-esque style of the medieval scenes looks good but adds little – and it’s difficult to avoid the feeling that the sumptuous visuals and excellent cast mean that this film is less than the sum of its parts.
Love Unto Death and Mélo are companion pieces which share the same aesthetic, themes and even the same cast. Both are ruminations on mortality and love, dealing with the death of a partner from illness and suicide respectively, and the subsequent aftermath.
The central couple in both films are played by Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi, a piece of casting that works remarkably well. Azéma is considerably younger than her on-screen partner, and given the flighty nature of the female characters this works remarkably well alongside the more measured and authoritative presence of Arditi. Supporting performances come from Fanny Ardant and the enigmatic André Dussollier. There are very few other characters in either film, and those that do appear serve merely to develop the plot.
Love Unto Death opens with the sudden and inexplicable death of Simon (Arditi) who is then mysteriously restored to life. What follows is an existential drama as Elisabeth (Azéma), his partner, falls deeper in love with the seemingly doomed Simon. Meanwhile their friends from the priesthood, Jérôme (Dussollier) and Judith (Ardant) discover that their own religious beliefs are challenged by the low-key unravelling of the plot.
The film unfolds slowly and quietly, with much dialogue and little in the way of action. Each scene is bookended by an orchestral score playing over an image of a snowy night sky. This provides the film with a strangely rhythmic sense, and a period in which the audience can reflect on what came before, turning the movie into a slow burning and introspective creation.
Mélo is more obviously theatrical, which is unsurprising given that it started life as a play by Henri Bernstein. It’s not difficult at all to imagine how the script would have worked on stage, with each scene occurring in a static setting with a tight focus on two or three characters at any given time. Characters are prone to long monologues, and scenes are edited almost like stage-cuts, with long fades to black leading into the following set-piece.
The story focuses on an illicit affair between Romaine (Azéma) and Marcel (Dussollier) behind the back of Pierre (Arditi). Set in 1920s Paris, the film evokes a world of flappers and concert musicians, which is drenched in melodrama. There’s something almost Brechtian about the style of the film, with theatrical over-acting rarely giving an impression of realism. Even scenes where the key characters play music look extremely clumsy – representations rather than a serious attempt at replicating truth.
The film always seems set to end in tragedy, and the drastic action that Romaine takes to keep her affair secret comes as no surprise. It does, however, set up the best scene of the film, a finely acted confrontation between the two male leads which changes pace and tone subtly throughout – it’s slightly at odds with the over-the-top acting which precedes it but it’s a fine tête-à-tête nonetheless.
A more absurdist approach permeates I Want To Go Home. At times the film almost becomes a comic caper as Joey Wellman (Adolph Green) a Jewish American cartoonist - who bears more than a passing resemblance to numerous Woody Allen characters - travels to Paris for an exhibition and an attempted reunification with his estranged daughter Elsie (Laura Benson).
Gerard Depardieu appears as philandering philosopher Gaulthier, who is a fan of Wellman’s work, and the action thus shifts from downtown Paris to the Frenchman’s mother’s country pile. Here a masked ball and some Carry On-style sexual shenanigans provide an amusing and diverting penultimate scene prior to the somewhat predictably redemptive ending.
Featuring cartoon cats interacting with humans, characters riding bicycles in full armour and Depardieu dressed as Popeye, the light comic touches keep the movie ticking along nicely. The real star of the show, however, is Adolph Green. His performance drives the movie as his tough exterior gradually melts and his xenophobia gives way to a mellow acceptance of French life and of his daughter’s lifestyle.
There is plenty to interest fans of Resnais in this collection, but it’s easy to see why these movies are regarded as some of the weaker elements of his canon, and it’s hard to imagine they will convert non-believers. RW
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