Alain Resnais

  • L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961)

    L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, July 2020) It’s certainly a relief to read several plot summaries for l’année denière à Marienbad and find out that no one else understood the movie either. Best described as a series of musings between two men and a woman set against the gorgeous backdrop of a French estate, this film only makes dreamlike sense—it’s detached from chronology, meaning, plot or conclusion. This lack of focus usually drives me up the wall, but I rather like the film’s atmosphere, all decked out in upper-class trappings, going through an expensive mansion while wearing evening wear. (It does help that director Alain Resnais spearheads a sumptuously rich visual patina to it all.) I accidentally left my TV’s motion smoothing active while watching the film (I usually disable it entirely) and this actually added to the film’s surreal, foggy quality. The accented French of the actors also contributes further layers of unreality to the result. I certainly wouldn’t recommend L’année dernière à Marienbad to cinema neophytes, but I’ve experienced far worse.

  • Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

    Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, July 2020) I am not and will never be a big fan of Hiroshima mon amour, but I have to respect a film that blends interracial romance with meditations on the nuclear bomb. Director Alain Resnais being a sober filmmaker, this is a quiet, long-running romantic drama. While the obsession with nuclear holocaust may be a reminder of the multi-decade social trauma that cold war generations endured, it’s also used in mature, subtle ways to illustrate the ongoing love story. The romantic material is universal even if highly specific to late-1950s Japan, as a French actress and a Japanese architect go through the city (with the unescapable spectre of nuclear devastation) and have a few tiffs. Appealing leads (Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada) do keep our attention during a film that’s deliberately long and moody. Interesting at times, interminable at others, Hiroshima mon amour nonetheless leaves a unique impression.