Fantastic Metropolis

Quick to capitalise on his success, Resnais took the opportunity to make his first colour-feature, Muriel, in 1963. It is an impressive film to watch for its visuals, but once again the characters exist in limbo, and the superb pastels and darker tones are wasted on the trite events that happen, or rather do not happen. Nonetheless it was a brave attempt to make a radical women’s film with political overtones (it makes references to the Algerian War) and ultimately emerges as less depressing than the two films which followed it, La guerre est finie in 1966 and Loin du Vietnam in 1967. Championed by the likes of J.G. Ballard, whose own Atrocity Exhibition reads like a literary Last Year in Marienbad, it was inevitable that Resnais would eventually try his hand at science fiction. In 1968, he made Je t’aime, je t’aime, an experimental piece of speculation which tried to merge Surrealism with the new concepts of the future and which ended up being neither a satisfactory avant-garde film nor an obvious example of science-fiction. It is true that it is a mite more accessible than its predecessors and succeeds in some small way at presenting a gloomy, metaphysical ambience. But both Truffaut and Tarkovsky were doing similar things to greater effect at the time.

A break was much needed, and Resnais took a six-year sabbatical before bouncing back in 1974 with Stavisky, easily his most immediate and orthodox film. Although Stavisky is the best introduction to his work, it is an atypical one and leaves a peculiar flavour of disenchantment. The intellectuals felt betrayed; they complained and Resnais answered with a film that backtracked slightly to his more difficult work but which failed to convince in either form or content. The master of gloss and facade, Resnais had compromised his skills for the sake of bigger returns at the box-office. Providence, released in 1976, was mildly controversial, mildly avant-garde, mildly a film.

Despite a thunderous score by Miklos Rosza, Providence never manages to convince or to mirror the emotion of the music. It is a study of old age and the old Proustian chestnuts of memory, taste, sensation, the periphery of motive, the edges of forgetfulness. What critic Dwight MacDonald said of Last Year in Marienbad can be applied equally to Providence, but sadly for different reasons: “It is a charade, a masque, beautiful to the eyes… and interesting to the mind, or at least to a crossword-puzzle-solving part of the mind, but curiously lacking in emotional effect.” Resnais, it seems, was unable to reconcile humanity and his own idiosyncratic versions of reality. He was no Cocteau.

The subject-matter of Providence demands a caring, sympathetic attitude that does not lapse into sentimentality. It could be argued that there is destructive art as well as constructive and that Providence is a monument to senility by the very absence of its compassion, but such sophistry usually rings hollow. Resnais’ real topic should have been autism rather than dementia; he shares the inability to communicate on the same level as his audience. While this might have been a strength in Last Year in Marienbad, it is decidedly a weakness in Providence. There are moments of vulgarity worthy of a Waters or Meyer; hardly appropriate elements in an art-house director fawned over by the cognoscenti.

Following Providence came two utterly dismal films, Mon oncle d’Amerique in 1980 and La vie est un roman in 1983. If all life is really a novel, as this latter film claims, then Resnais was unable to make a good case for the theory. Again he was influenced by Marguerite Duras, whose belief that literature is real and reality a fiction is a convenient one for her chosen career. It is rather a sad admission in that it elevates the product, the artifice, over its creator in Borgesian fashion but then fails to deliver. For paradoxes to be truly effective they have to be on the horizons of understanding; the consumer has to feel that there is a solution just beyond their grasp. A paradox that is meaningless is not a paradox. But like all of Resnais’ films these two are unarguable. It is impossible to disagree with something that has no meaning. Resnais not only makes the Emperor’s New Clothes; he also wears them, and only the viewer prepared to do likewise will be able to share his rather peculiar insights and those of Duras and Robbe-Grillet.

And yet in the rather grotesquely titled L’amour a mort, made in 1984, and the blander Melo, completed in 1986, there are hints of the former brilliance that astounded audiences two decades earlier. Melo, with its theatre simulacrums, is hardly a Last Year in Marienbad, but it is not entirely a failure either. Again there was a convergence with Duras and if there is any value in their collaborations this one certainly shows more of it than any other film since Hiroshima mon amour. Resnais has re-embraced pure style, leaving angst to those better able to deal with it. He is the physicist of the cinema world and only when he accepts his role do his creations show any life. But it is a crystalline species of life, one that glitters and precludes any warmth. It is hardly surprising that he should appeal to the likes of Ballard.

In summation then, Resnais is an important minor figure in cinema, a director who chose a path that no-one else seemed inclined to follow; an imagist who charted unknown territory which was barren and alien but not infrequently beautiful; the chief engineer of the New Dehumanism; a rare talent encased in a startling monochrome jewel, as wondrous and uncaring and transient as the Aurora Borealis. Last Year at Marienbad should be seen by all cinema-lovers just once; the same way that it is also advisable to view Tarkovsky’s Stalker or Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts or even Goddard’s Alphaville: not necessarily with unashamed enjoyment but with a dim contentment and an appreciation of sheer technique.