Alain Resnais’s "Life of Riley"

They say life is not a rehearsal, but Alain Resnais's Life of Riley (Aimer, boire et chanter and not La Vie de Reilly is curiously the French title) portrays human existence as a series of rehearsals which take place totally off stage. Resnais last work. which premiered at The New York Film Festival and is now in theatrical release (he died in March) may seem like a far cry from Last Year at Marienbad, the l961 film, staged in an aristocratic chateau which created the director’s international reputation. The landscape is suburban and Life of Riley poses as a comedy of manners about the entanglements of a series of couples. Riley is based on an Alan Ayckbourn play while Last Year at Marienbad was shot from a script written Alain Robbe-Grillet, a master of the nouveau roman, and memory, one of the major themes of both Marienbad and Night and Fog, his classic documentary about Nazi concentration camps, is not a major theme in Riley. But the two movies share a remarkably similar air of mystery, despite their radically different tones and settings. In Riley, for example one of the main characters George, who is involved sexually with nearly all the women, never even appears. George functions like Hickey in The Iceman Cometh. He gains his power by his absence. The only other character who is talked about, but who never manages to make an appearance is significantly the director, Peggy. While Marienbad evoked an air of menace, Riley presents similarly disconcerting notions under the guise of lighthearted comedy. Reality looks like a stage set filled with scrims and topiaries and there is even an audience to the play that is not being rehearsed, composed of workers and attendees at a 16 year old’s party. Meanwhile Resnais further usurps the viewer’s bearings by introducing animations, head shots held tight against an abstract hatched backdrop and recurring shots taken from the point of view of a car rolling through the English countryside towards destinations that are not necessarily those connected to the hermetic couplings taking place on the “set.” Jack, Tamara, Colin, Kathyrn, Monica and Simeon are the couples and Monica, Colin, Kathryn and George constitute the cast. But what is the play within the play of the movie and what if anything does it have to do with the action occurring on Resnais’s set?

Je t’aime, je t'aime

The French love memory. Proust’s masterpiece was A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, In Search of Lost Time or The Remembrance of Things Past, as it’s most often translated. The French philosopher Henri Bergson” wrote a tome entitled Matter and Memory in which he distinguishes between “habitual” and “pure memory." Freud said dreams were “the royal road to the unconscious” and Bergson showed how certain kinds of mnemonic processes, perhaps like the Proustian madeleine, go beyond either the “habitual" or “pure" to open a door up on the past. Alain Resnais’s Je t’aime, Je t’aime (l968) currently playing at Film Forum takes the form of a science fiction film and concerns a time machine. But it’s crude science fiction at best and really just an occasion for the exploration of memory. Here Resnais continues the style of exposition he famously introduced in Last Year at Marienbad (l961) where flashbacks and repetitions (like that of the films title “je t’aime, Je t’aime”) produce a skewed vision of illusion and reality. It’s a project that also consumed two earlier films, Hiroshima Mon Amour (l959) and the documentary Night and Fog (1955). Resnais’s central character Claude Ridder (Claude Rich), who is recovering from a suicide attempt, is recruited outside a mental hospital, primarily because he’s someone, who cares little about living and is willing to risk a voyage into the past. In going back in time, the narrative inevitably plumbs the mystery of why he has attempted to take his own life. There's something mysterious about Marienbad and the same air of suspense hovers over Je t’aime Je t’aime, but it's the kind of suspense that accompanies the unfolding of memory in a psychoanalytic session. Thus, it’s not clear if the death of Claude’s girlfriend Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot), a quintessentially anhedonic character, is an accident or murder and both Catrine and Claude are linked thematically by their lack of desire to live. Mice are frequently used in experiments on memory and besides the film’s inadvertent excursions into the neurological concepts of both episodic and procedural memory, the mouse is Je t’aime’s one concession to hard science.

Wild Grass

Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, with a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet, was a rite-of-passage film for anyone who fell in love with European art cinema in the ‘60s. In his latest film, Wild Grass, the 88-year-old Resnais returns to the visual beauty of objects—shoes, pianos, watches, the surfaces the camera vivisects so memorably in Marienbad—but this time the notion is one of ingestion. A striking red-headed dentist named Marguerite Muir, who is also a flyer, is robbed of her purse. An older married man, George Palet, finds her wallet and in returning it to her becomes obsessed with her existence. The obsession involves memory, since he’s always been transfixed by aviation. But his desire to serve her or pay homage to her has the quality of devouring. He writes letters, phones her incessantly, and finally slashes the tires of her car in order to prevent her from going anywhere. However, when she finally relents and allows him to know her, he ends up having sex with her best friend Josepha, and finally banishes her from his house. It is almost ridiculous to compare Wild Grass to Bergman’s Persona, since the tone of the two movies is so wildly different, but there is a similar reversal upon which the drive of the whole film hinges. Palet (palette?) probes Marguerite, but it is Marguerite who, taking a cue from her profession, ultimately does the drilling.