Alain Resnais's I Want to Go Home (1989)

I can't make up my mind about this film: although it's certainly not one of Resnais's best, can we really talk about this great director's worst? The word 'worst' doesn't seem to fit the man, and the fact that all of the characters are unbelievable seems to be irrelevant.

Joey Wellman (Adolph Green) is the main character, and Green wrote the screenplay for Singin' in the Rain. Here he plays a cantankerous, very loud-voiced ageing American bigot visiting France for the first time, and distressed that not everyone can understand his language. In fact, the film is in essence about Franco-American relationships. Joey has come over with his partner Lena (Linda Lavin) for a cartoon exhibition in Paris, but is more interested in finding his daughter Elsie (Laura Benson), whom he's not seen for two years as she's gone to Paris to study for an MA on Flaubert. It so happens that the Sorbonne expert on Flaubert, the person she's been seeking to read her thesis, Christian Gaultier (Gérard Depardieu), also seems to be an expert on BDs, and has invited Joey and Lena to the home of his mother Isabelle (Micheline Presle).

I didn't say that cartoon bubbles 'Hep Catt' and 'Sally Catt' frequently appear by Joey and Elsie's heads, as if as the viewer is reading their secret thoughts, seeing them disagreeing with themselves, acting as their superego, etc. But this is not off-putting, it works in well with the general comedy item which this film is. So are we really concerned when Christian (who's still not read Elsie's dissertation) joins in the fancy dress party at his mother's dressed at Popeye, Joey as Hepp Catt, Elsie as Tweetie Pie, etc? No, not a bit.

Then Joey escapes from the party to the village, desperate to leave for America. The locals don't understand any English, he tries to make them understand by singing American songs, gathers quite a crowd of villagers around him. Worried, Elsie and Lena seek him out, and find him the star of attraction in the local café. How does this end? Obviously, wannabee French gonzesse Elsie returns to the States, as does Lena, leaving behind Joey who's happy with Christian's mother. How's that for Franco-American relationships?

Alain Resnais's Mon oncle d'Amérique | My American Uncle (1979)

There are three principal characters in this film, which is by no means as odd as it sounds: Jean Le Gall (Roger Pierre), an ambitious normalien with an interest in politics and writing; Janine Garnier (Nicole Garcia), who was brought up by communist parents and is now an actor who will for a short time live with Jean; and René Ragueneau (Gérard Depardieu), who comes from a farming background but will become the manager of a textile factory. All to some extent go against their parents' wishes, and all associate with an acting character who will appear in short black and white clip of films representing the actor in times in a particular state of heightened emotion when the character is in that state himself or herself: Danielle Darrieux for Jean, Jean Marais for Janine, and Jean Gabin for René.

And their difficulties are many. The behaviourist Professor Henri Laborit appears as himself, spouting his theories and 'illustrating' them with laboratory rats and short clips of the characters' difficulties which we've previously seen. The characters have varying degrees of problems, particularly seen psychosomatically in the case of Jean and René, and experienced in the most extreme case by René's attempted suicide.

There's no singing in this film, although another of Resnais's interests – cartoons – appears with Le Roi d'or being mentioned twice, once in relation to Jean digging for treasure as a child on one of the two Îles Logoden in the Golfe du Morbihan: the cartoon is mentioned this second occasion in relation to the expression 'Mon oncle d'Amérique', who is an imaginary distant relative who, in fantasies, leaved a rich inheritance.

Marguerite Duras: Hiroshima mon amour (1960)

This book is mainly the screenplay of the Alain Resnais's film Hiroshima mon amour, which is essentially the same as the film. However, the Appendices are interesting, and shed light on the background of the film. Duras describes how the female progagonist, whose early life was spent in Nevers with her pharmacist father, came to meet her German lover: his arm was burned and he sought help, and the pharmacist's daughter cared for his wound on several occasions until he was completely cured. But then, the German followed her on her weekly bicycle rides to a farm for butter and they got to know and love each other in barns and bedrooms. He was her first sexual love, her first emotional love, until he was killed at the end of the war. The following lines reveal the extent of their love, and they intended to marry in Bavaria after the war:

'Son corps était devenu le mien, je n'arrivais plus à l'en discerner. J'étais devenue la négation vivante de la raison. [...]. Que ceux qui n'ont jamais connu d'être ainsi dépossédés d'eux-mêmes me jettent la première pierre' (My body had become his, I could no longer manage to tell the difference. I had become the living denial of reason. [...] Let those who have never known such dispossession of themselves cast the first stone.')

Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

Alain Resnais and scriptwriter Marguerite Duras both agreed that it was impossible to make a film about Hiroshima, and this is the result. Everything is double, not only a collaboration between Resnais and Duras, but memory and forgetting, past and present, life and death, love and war, Nevers and Hiroshima, the personal and the collective, even the film really only has two human characters, male and female, Elle (Emmanuelle Riva) and Lui (Eiji Okada).

At the beginning we see two bodies (or shoulders of bodies), covered in the dust of the past, until the dust goes and we see two sweating bodies loving each other in Hiroshima: she is a French actor who has been visiting to make a film about peace in a city destroyed by hate, he is a Japanese architect or engineer who wasn't in Hiroshima at the time of the destruction. Both are married to another person.

There is archival footage of the former city, footage of the present rebuilt town in 1958, the museum, and shots of Nevers and its Place de la République where a street is now renamed after Duras and there's a plaque commemorating where the shooting took place. There are reconstructions of Nevers around the time that the bomb hit Hiroshima, when Elle's trauma serves as a  personal microcosm of the collective trauma of Hiroshima: she had an affair with a German soldier who was killed, and she lay on his dying body all night, underwent the ritual of the 'tondues' by having her head shaved, rode all night on her bicycle to Paris, away from the traumatic memory. In the present, she says, she doesn't think about the past, although it haunts her in her dreams.

He is the only person she's told about the German and it's here where memory and forgetting merge into a paradoxical oneness. He wants her to stay but it's an impossibility, an impossible love, and this impossible film is one of the most important in the history of cinema.

Alain Resnais's L'Amour à mort | Love Unto Death (1984)

Resnais believes that meeting a loved one is very important in life, and mentions a peasant expression from the Ardèche: 'Quand on a du bien on a du mal', or 'Where there is good there is bad'. He says that the important thing is to make things last as you're surrounded by dangers, the most extreme being death, and he questions how can love be intensified. Resnais also calls himself an 'athée mystique', an expression he retained from the German poet Stefan George.

Elisabeth (Sabine Azéma) is living with the (older) archaeologist Simon (Pierre Arditi) when he dies one night, as witnessed by Dr Rozier (Jean Dasté). But he isn't dead at all and, as it were, comes to life.

Death permanently arrests time. But Simon and Judith (Fanny Ardant) – now married to Simon's best friend Jérôme (André Dussollier) – didn't achieve this in their failed young suicide pact. Instead, Elizabeth has to come to this conclusion after Simon's second death: he's too haunted by his former death to make sense of a second life, so Elizabeth joins him.

Alain Resnais's Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968)

Je t'aime, je t'aime is a science fiction film, the screenplay written by both Alain Resnais and Jacques Sternberg over five years. Resnais insisted that Claude Rich be the principal actor, and no one but him.

Claude Ridder (Claude Rich) fails to kill himself and after leaving the clinic where he was recovering he is picked up by researchers and, on his agreement (what has a suicidal case to lose?) taken to a scientific research building in the countryside. Here he is told that a mouse has been tested, taken to the past, and has survived: Claude asks how the researchers know that it happened, which is of course a perfectly valid question, and the researchers have to admit that they don't speak Mouse so communication is a problem. But what has Claude to lose? These experiments only being in their initial stages, this is just a visit to the past one year ago, and for a minute: on asking what are his chances of survival, the answer is 100%: well, they've only tested this on mice before.

And so Claude takes the injection, enters a timecraft which resembles a gigantic artichoke with various wires attached and huge straws sticking out of the top, and (with a mouse at the side of him) goes into the past. The problem is that the experiment goes wrong and he only briefly comes back.

Claude's partner was Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot), and Resnais's film now moves into many flashbacks, many repeated ones of Claude and Catrine's holiday a year before on the Riviera, with Claude diving but Catrine not wanting to: strangely, Claude finds a mouse scampering on the beach. There follow a number of scenes leading up to Claude's attempted suicide, his absolute boredom with work and its constant repetiton, Catrine's death in Glasgow and Claude's inability to tolerate it, leading to him taking a gun and misfiring.

But now? The researchers leave the building and find that Claude has returned, only it seems as though he may have succeeded in his attempt this time. I may be wrong, but I see this as one of Resnais's less successful experiments with time.

Alain Resnais's Muriel, ou le temps d'un retour (1963)

On the surface, Muriel – the film which followed two years after L'Année derniére à Marienbad – is far removed from the earlier film with the concreteness of its characters and its linearity. But the central themes of time and memory remain, and the past intrudes on both the concreteness of the characters and the linearity of the film. Also, very little is as fixed as it may initially appear.

There are discrepancies – sometimes due to misremembering, to forgetfulness, to lies, to more bizarre phenomena – between the past and the present: after twenty years, Aphonse (Jean-Pierre Kérien) says Hélène (Delphine Seyrig) has changed her hair, for example; and there are discrepancies between the dialogue and what is at the same time seen onscreen: when Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée) is showing his film of Algeria and speaking about Muriel to the horse hirer (Yves Vincent), for example. What we see in the film as a whole is a claustrophobic, unstable world where lies and uncertainties prevail. The many jump-cuts at the beginning set the mood for this uncertainty. People and things can be seen as if through a distorting mirror, such as the comic glasses Bernard wears at the dinner table, or the several incomplete Bernards that his girlfriend Marie-Do (Martine Vatel) – sometimes referred to as 'Muriel' – sees through a kaleidoscope.

The omnipresence of clocks appears to be focused on the present time, although psychologically it is past time which is the main preoccupation: World War II when Alphonse and the teenage Hélène were lovers, the Algerian war when Bernard and Robert (Philippe Laudenbach) took part in the torture and killing of a young Algerian woman whose name may have been Muriel.

Between the end of World War II and the present Alphonse has invented a false past for himself as a bar owner in Algeria, and although he has in fact never been there he persists in the lie, even at first refusing to take off his coat in Hélène's flat because he claims to be used to strong heat. But then he seems to be made up of lies, and for instance the 'niece' he has brought to Boulonge-sur-mer with him, Françoise (Nita Klein), is in reality his (much younger) lover.

In Boulogne, where an estimaated 85 per cent of the town was destroyed in the war, the past dwells side by side with the present: old buildings with new, and also the rubble of war, but still there's a precariousness, such as the new building Roland de Smoke (Claude Sainval) speaks of which falls from the cliff in turn to become rubble. Hélène's flat is unstable in a different way in that the objects are constantly changing: selling antiques from her own living accommodation, the past in a number of different periods is every-present to her and Bernard. And this physical instability is in tune with the psychological instability of the characters: it is particularly Bernard, Hélène and Alphonse who are haunted by the ghosts of the past.

And Alphonse is also haunted by the present in the form of his brother-in-law Ernest (Jean Champion), who's come to expose his lies and deceit to those assembled in Hélène's flat, as well as ensure Alphonse's return to Paris, to his wife Simone (Francoise Bertin). But this is not to be.

A major film of Alain Resnais's, a major film tout court.

Alain Resnais's L'Année dernière à Marienbad | Last Year in Marienbad (1961)

Samuel Beckett's own English translation of his originally French-written play Fin de partie (or Endgame) (1957) – interestingly published just four years before the release of Marienbad – contains the lines:

'Hamm: We're not beginning to...to...mean something?

Clov: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that's a good one!'

We could make a number of comparisons between the play and the film – the fact that Beckett's play refers to a game, is apparently absurd in nature, etc – but to my mind meaning is the key concept. To Hamm and Clov, meaning is almost a joke, or almost something to be feared, and the brunette A (Delphine Seyrig) seems to be frightened of having a meaning which the Italian-accented X (Giorgio Albertazzi) is attempting to give her by taking her away from the ever-repeating present, fixing her in a past somewhere (perhaps in Marienbad), and moving with her into a future which is by definition indefinable.

This is of course absurd, but then the film Marienbad, with its eternal present peopled by speechless, unmoving ghost-like beings some of the time or at other times dancing, small-talking, mindless game-playing zombies trapped in a surreal, oneiric or potentially nightmarish situation of which they appear to have no cognizance, is surely absurd?. Over them, Death (personified perhaps by M (Sacha Pitoëff) for Mort, possibly) stalks, or gloats: they are evidently lost in a living death and only X holds the key to at least free A from. I'm also reminded of Philippe (Lino Ventura) in Jean-Pierre Melville's film L'Armée des ombres calling the three domino-playing men 'imbéciles' in the Vichy concentration camp which can only lead to death.

Also coming to mind is Pierre Assouline's book of interviews with Antoine Blondin, Le Flâneur de la rive gauche: Entretiens (1988): famously, Blondin wrote in his novel L'Humeur vagabonde: 'Un jour nous prendrons des trains qui partent'. Although Assouline can't pin Blondin down to a specific meaning of that expression, it suddenly occurs to me that meaning itself is exactly what the sentence is about: one day our lives will have meaning. Perhaps X gives A meaning in the end, which she has all the time been avoiding for so long: but why? Even odder, this reminds me of what my cousin Charles Pembleton wrote on the title-page of his poetry book Living in a Timewarp (1974), which he published shortly after a traumatic experience: 'Anything above zero is painful because it has meaning.' Yes, that must be it.

Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet's L'Année dernière à Marienbad – in spite (or perhaps because) of its lack of hardfast meaning – is one of the greatest films ever made, and just in the English langauge alone its influences extend from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining to David Mould's video of Blur's song 'To The End'.

Alain Resnais's Nuit et brouillard | Night and Fog (1955)

Nuit et brouillard comes from the German name given to the deportees to the concentration camps, NN (Nacht und Nebel), the oblivion of night and fog. The screenplay of this short is by Jean Cayrol, who survived Mauthausen, and the footage is black and white archival, and (then) presentday colour of the remains of the Holocaust. In a sense, it's a forerunner to Claude Lanzmann's monumental nine-hour Shoah (1985), which is largely a great number of accounts of people's experiences of the Holocaust, without archival footage. Arguably, Resnais's film is more harrowing as it shows the starving Jews, the murdered Jews kicked into pits, the use of dead Jews' hair to make mats, of their skin to make a kind of paper to draw on, of their bodies to make soap, and on and on. Along with Lanzmann's film, this should be compulsory viewing, so that we never forget the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, so that such obscenities never happen again.

Alain Resnais's On connaît la chanson | Same Old Song (1997)

This is a monster film for Alain Resnais, even if it's not his best: but then what could be this hugely important director's worst? Time, and in some respects memory, are inevitably important here, in what can (very liberally) be described as a quirky (and brilliant) musical. Resnais dedicates this to Denis Potter, who died a few years before, and is most famous for the lip-synching of such television plays as 'The Singing Detective' and 'Lipstick on your Collar'.

Here though, it's not whole songs that are heard, but snatches of them, in total thirty-six in forty-seven interventions. They represent private thoughts sung by the original performers but mimed by the actors, and can represent an emotion clearly manifested in the film but more likely represent private, secret thoughts known only to the actor or the audience. But the songs spread over a wide period of time, and it is highly unlikely that many (if any) even French viewers recognise all of the songs, which stretch over seventy-three years, ranging from Albert Préjean's 'Je m'donne' (1921) through to Michel Sardou's 'Déjà vu' (1994), passing by Édith Piaf, Charles Aznavour, Serge Gainsbourg, Léo Ferré, Sheila, Alain Bashung, Téléphone, etc. 

Certainly any French person – or any lover of Francophone popular music – will recognise a number of these songs, although the internationally known Georges Brassens, Jacques Brel or Georges Moustaki aren't represented. What they'll recognise is their own history, their own memories through the time they've lived, grafting many more personal stories onto this particular one.

For all that, the general narrative is fairly simple: Claude Lalande (Pierre Arditi) is married to Odile (Sabine Azéma) who wants to move to a new dream apartment through estate agent Marc Duveyrier (Lambert Wilson); Odile's younger sister is Camille (Agnès Jaoui), who is coming to the end of seven years studying 'Les Chevaliers paysans de l'an 1000 au lac de Paladru' for a doctorate but is also working as a tour guide; Odile's former lover hypercondriac Nicolas (Jean-Pierre Bacri), who is married and has been living in England, has just returned to Paris to find work and bring his family over; Simon (André Dussollier) works as a clerk with Marc as boss, writes radio plays more as a hobby than a source of revenue, and is secretly in love with Camille, following her tours when time permits; Marc is an egotistical womaniser who is Simon's boss, and whose latest conquest is Camille.

History is not only important via the songs or the characters' past but through other things: Camille lectures her ever-changing groups on such things as France's Nazi past, le Parc des Buttes-Chaumont with its Temple de la Sibylle and Pont des Suicidés, the house of the Marquise de Brinvilliers (on whom Simon has written a play), the Cimetière du Père Lachaise (where the famous erection of Victor Noir is scrupulously avoided, probably because too well known therefore a cliché), and so on. Obviously the sights here are off-centre, and even the sculpture near the estate agent, la Fontaine des Polypores in the 15e arrondissement, built in 1983, is hardly on the normal tourist circuit.

Through this web of relationships lie a tangle of lies, half-truths, misunderstandings, inaccuracies, etc. Nicolas is pretending not to be a humble chauffeur, Claude has a much younger lover, Simon pretends to have a profession as a playwright and not also a lowly estate agent clerk, when he meets Camille Marc goes along with the pretence that he was crying and snivelling over a relationship rather than a cold, but most of all he lied by omission because Odile and Claude's wonderful flat with its superb view will soon have the view wiped out by what looks like a horrendous HLM.

All will come out in the house-warming, but particularly Marc's lie by omission, which is not the only thing to cause electric, poisonous atmosphere by the appearance of the jellyfish, but the ending is quite cataclysmic. A superb film.

From Wikipédia, the songs:

Joséphine Baker : J'ai deux amours (Götz Burger)

Dalida et Alain Delon : Parole parole (Jean-Pierre Bacri et Sabine Azéma)

Charles Aznavour : Et moi dans mon coin (Pierre Arditi)

René Koval : C'est dégoûtant mais nécessaire (Sabine Azéma)

Simone Simon : Afin de plaire à son papa (Sabine Azéma)

Gaston Ouvrard : Je n'suis pas bien portant (Jean-Pierre Bacri)

Albert Préjean : Je m'donne (Lambert Wilson)

Jacques Dutronc : J'aime les filles (Lambert Wilson)

Michel Sardou : Déjà vu (André Dussollier)

Gilbert Bécaud : Nathalie (André Dussollier)

Maurice Chevalier : Dans la vie faut pas s'en faire (Lambert Wilson)

Arletty et Jean Aquistapace : Et le reste ? (Agnès Jaoui et Lambert Wilson)

Édith Piaf : J'm'en fous pas mal (Agnès Jaoui)

Alain Bashung : Vertige de l'amour (André Dussollier)

Sheila : L'école est finie (Sabine Azéma)

Serge Lama : Je suis malade (Jean-Pierre Bacri)

Léo Ferré : Avec le temps (Jean-Pierre Bacri)

Henry Garat : Avoir un bon copain (André Dussollier)

Jane Birkin : Quoi (Jean-Pierre Bacri et André Dussollier)

France Gall : Résiste (Sabine Azéma)

Henry Garat : Amusez-vous (Lambert Wilson)

Charles Richard : La tête qu'il faut faire (Lambert Wilson et Sabine Azéma)

Alain Souchon : Sous les jupes des filles (Sabine Azéma)

Eddy Mitchell : La Dernière Séance (Jean-Pierre Bacri)

Sylvie Vartan : La plus belle pour aller danser (Lambert Wilson, Sabine Azéma, etc)

Serge Gainsbourg : Je suis venu te dire que je m'en vais (Pierre Arditi)

Eddy Mitchell : Je vous dérange (André Dussollier)

Téléphone : Ça (c'est vraiment toi) (Pierre Arditi et autres acteurs)

Dranem : Quand on perd la tête (Sabine Azéma)

Johnny Hallyday : Ma gueule (André Dussollier)

Pierre Perret : Mon p'tit loup (Pierre Arditi)

Claude François : Le Mal-aimé (Lambert Wilson)

Michel Jonasz : J'veux pas qu'tu t'en ailles (Jean-Pierre Bacri)

Julien Clerc : Ce n'est rien (André Dussollier)

Claude François : Chanson populaire (Pierre Arditi)

Eddy Mitchell : Le Blues du blanc (Lambert Wilson)

Alain Resnais's Cœurs | Private Fears in Public Places (2006)

This comedy drama is light years away from the early films which gave Resnais his hallowed name in cinema history: in fact on occasion it very nearly, but not quite, tips into farce. Still constant are some intrusive thoughts from memory, and the ending is a very long way from the traditonal comedy.

Everyone in the film is discontented with his or her current situation and strives escape from it. And if it's largely about loneliness, it's also about sex. Interestingly, and although this is in no way a sequel, Thierry (André Dussollier) is an estate agent as he was in On connaît la chanson nine years before, but Charlotte (Sabine Azéma) works there too. Thierry, who lives with his much younger sister Gaëlle (Isabelle Carré) is sexually frustrated and lusts after Charlotte: particularly after this supposedly devout woman lends Thierry two VHS tapes (yes, in 2006) she's recorded religious programmes on, but inadvertently forgotten to erase scenes of herself cavorting sexily in front of the screen in her underwear.

Then there's the couple Nicole (Laura Morante) and Dan (Lambert Wilson) who are having trouble finding a suitable flat, with Dan insisting that it has room for his office: this recalls Nicolas (Jean-Pierre Bacri) giving Dussolier's character problems in On connaît la chanson. But as we are made to probe a little deeper, the relationship between Nicole and Dan is not what it seems: he's been kicked out of the army for some unknown reason, drowns his sorrows frequently at the local bar attached to a hotel and comes home drunk. Nicole is sick of him because, whereas she has a job, Dan doesn't seem interested in getting one. In fact it irks her so much that she throws him out and he's forced to temporarily stay at the four-star hotel. The barman Lionel (Pierre Arditi) advises him to write a small ad for the paper, and quite by chance (yes, I repeat that it's 2006) also mentions the internet, although we see nothing of it here, not even a mobile phone.

Meanwhile, Gaëlle is secretly going out at night to meet potential partners, although she's not having much success with the lonely hearts columns. Surprisingly, when she meets Dan they really strike it off: not only does she like to get drunk too, but she'll meet him the following night at the bar attached to the hotel.

And so we come to Lionel, who's had a bad time with life and is now looking after his cantankerous father Arthur, who we never actually see, although we hear the voice of Claude Rich. But Lionel now needs someone else to look after his father while he works nights at the bar, and who should come along as a nursemaid but Bible-wielding Charlotte? She receives plates and food thrown at her, gets exasperated, but finds a way to soothe him by parading into the bedroom in her underwear.

The end of the film is one of the most pessimistic as possible. Nicole feels really bad about throwing Dan out, but when she comes to see Dan at the bar Gaëlle sees them and runs back to her brother. And Arthur has been sent to hospital and is telling scarcely believable tales about his homehelp. The result is that everyone is trapped inside his or her loneliness. Bleak indeed, but it appears (reading Wikidedia's synopsis of it) to adhere pretty strictly to Alan Ayckbourn's play Private Fears in Public Places (2004) on which it's based.

Paris 2015: Alain Resnais, Cimetière du Montparnasse #13

'ALAIN RESNAIS

1922 – 2014

–––––––'

Alain Resnais is noted for directing a number of films, particularly Nuit et brouillard (1956), Hiroshima mon amour (1959), L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), Muriel ou le Temps d'un retour (1963), Mon oncle d'Amérique (1980), and On connaît la chanson (1997).

Next to Resnais's grave is that of Nicole Vedrès (1911–65), who briefly worked with Resnais.

(As with all the following posts of graves in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, many thanks to Joseph for locating them for us: his knowledge of the cemetery was a truly important help to us.)