Alain Resnais
A Beautiful Itch: His Movies
The simple plot, in which a French actress travels to Hiroshima to make an anti-war film, meets a Japanese architect and jumps into bed with him, conceals a deeper vein of riches. The cold photography, the elaborate use of flashback and memory (where the Proustian allusions come in) were all truly original at the time, and Resnais’ rigidity at following the script led to the taking of many risks. Indeed, Resnais’ rigid style has become something of a legend in film circles: he steadfastly refuses to deviate from a script and claims that the most important aspect of the production is the editing. Thus Hiroshima mon amour comes over as stiff and mechanical and somewhat lacking in emotion, defects that lend it a geometric beauty and stark symmetry. The sight of the huge mushroom cloud rising over the Japanese port and the ensuing devastation are like blueprints not for the end of civilisation but for the creation of a new form of terrible consciousness.
Other scenes proved less palatable to French sensibilities. While the French actress (played to great effect by Emmanuelle Riva) makes love to the Japanese architect, she recalls an earlier affair she had with a German soldier during the second-world war; an affair for which she was locked in the cellar by her parents and punished after the war by having her head shaved. The issue of collaborators has always been a thorny one in France; Resnais decided to tackle it head-on, as it were.
Hiroshima mon amour has also been cited as the very first example of a new genre: the film-text. According to one improbably named film critic, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, this means that “the film becomes text, not because it includes a text… but rather because it incorporates a textual apparatus which deprives the written text of its autonomy, its specificity even, and at the same time lays the film open to the invasion of an off-screen space, by definition hidden.”(!) What it does actually mean is still unclear, but it is certain that it reached its apotheosis with Resnais’ next film, the notorious Last Year in Marienbad, completed in 1961, which is an enigma inside a puzzle inside a conundrum and which is hated and loved, despised and admired, and has polarised opinion like almost no other film in cinema history.
Scripted by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last Year in Marienbad is in many ways the ultimate Resnais film. Robbe-Grillet prepared not only the plot (dubious) and the supposed rationale of the various characters but a detailed shooting script which outlined exactly how Resnais was supposed to film scenes and precisely what he should do with them afterwards. Robbe-Grillet was the real lunatic-genius behind this monster; Resnais was more like a catalyst or an algorithmic adding machine by which the calculations of the enigmas could be solved or, more often, twisted into even greater paradoxes.
Robbe-Grillet, doyen of the nouvea romanciers, was the darling of the French literary set. His novels, which include Jealousy and Djinn (either works of hard brilliance or else the most boring books ever written, depending on the prevailing point of view) were supposed to be completely unique, but really were merely carrying on the tradition established twenty-five years earlier by Louis Aragon. One of the leading Surrealists, Aragon was responsible for Paris Peasant (1936), a novel in which the main characters were not people but objects. Robbe-Grillet adapted the form to suit his own purposes with the result that novels such as Jealousy (1957) require detective work from the reader to be intelligible. A love-scene, for example, will not be described in terms of the characters and their actions but by the relative position and appearances of the objects around them. The reader is expected to absorb the hints and fill in the gaps.
Last Year in Marienbad possibly pushes the form too far. Some empathy at least is required if the reader, or cinema-goer, is to rack their brains trying to solve a puzzle that is almost certainly unsolvable. There is no empathy at all in Resnais’ film or Robbe-Grillet’s script. What it lacks in humanity, however, it more than makes up for in visual beauty and coldly clever images and scenes. The story is ostensibly set in an anonymous hotel peopled by wealthy anonymous guests. These are a man, X; a woman, A; and another man, M, who is possibly A’s husband. X tries to persuade A that they met together last year in Marienbad and that they had an affair. A cannot remember any of this, but eventually she is persuaded. When X also convinces her that they agreed to elope together, she leaves with him. It is an odd story, one that is somehow beyond the call of reason and therefore unarguable.
Briefly fashionable in high society, Last Year in Marienbad now seems more like an elaborate game than ever. But at the time, intellectuals took the film seriously: they discussed the possible symbolism of actress Delphine Seyrig’s hairstyle and her outrageous feather dress; they wondered at the meanings supposedly encoded in the sculpted gardens of Frederiksbad; they gnawed their nails at the mysteries contained in the sinister game of dominoes played between X and M. They simply assumed that there was more to the film than there was, like students who spend long hours almost analysing Finnegans Wake instead of just reading it.
