CLAUDE RICH AND OLGA GEORGES-PICOT IN JE T'AIME, JE T'AIME

A rare Alain Resnais film about love, memory and time

Resnais may have denied being a Nouvelle Vague filmmaker since he starting making films before they did, but his Je t'aime, je t'aime has the breeziness of that era. This little seen film, a commercial failure yet an influence on other filmmakers, is having a February 2014 reissue at Film Forum. In the film, the tall skinny Ridder (Claude Rich) even seems lighthearted about his suicide attempt. Scientists come and get him during the film's overlong opening. He has been at a sanatorium recovering from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but now is out. They figure that if he still cares little for his life, he'll volunteer for their experiment in time travel. They've safely taken white mice back a few minutes into the past; or at least they think so. Now they want to try it on a human, which may be riskier. Ridder agrees, and after injecting him with a massive dose of a drug called T5, they put him in a big gizmo that looks like a mixture of a walk-in art installation, a goofy model of a human brain, and a giant mushroom. Ridder lies down comfortably, and voilà! Except it goes awry. We get a randomly fractured version of the sentimental, erotic, and occupational history of Ridder's life in the period leading up to his suicide attempt. The theme of a man selected to time travel in his own past of course occurs in Chris Market's classic 1962 short, La Jetée, which inspired Terry Gilliam's 1995 12 Monkeys. But while Marker's film is set in a post-apocalyptic future, Resnais' setting is contemporary.

Fractured time-schemes delivered through film editing have since become familiar, but Resnais' pioneering effort here is not only of historical interest but also fresh and unique -- even if it leaves some viewers unmoved. It's quite different from his two most famous films, lacking either the heavy emotionality of Hiroshima mon amour or the surreal elegance of Last Year at Marienbad but sharing with them Resnais' constant fascination with the flexibility of time and the unreliability of memory. Je t'aime, je t'aime is shot like a more conventional French film of the time. The scenes are not loaded with artistry or meaning, but they've been wildly rearranged into a mix of moments that jump around in time -- an exercise in nonlinear, random narrative. Instead of his just going back one year for one minute and then returning as the scientists intended, Ridder skips around in time like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five (but only within his own life). Some "stops" last a few seconds, more, several minutes. There's one -- the happy moment he'd wanted to return to -- where he comes up out of the water after some scuba diving and chats with the love of his life while stumbling around on some big rocks -- that keeps popping back in segments of varying detail and varying length. This may be the visual equivalent of the repeated verbal refrains of Hiroshima and Marienbad. As with all such fractured films, such as the later reverse-chronology narratives of Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000) and François Ozon's 5x2 (2004), the viewer mentally rearranges scenes so they ultimately make sense -- after a fashion: Resnais and his screenwriter may want each moment to float independently, free of causality or logic. He may want us to see how fluid identity is. "I'm asking myself who your are," Ridder's mistress Wiana (Anouk Ferjac) says to him and he replies, "Quelque chose d'assez flou, de plus en plus flou."(Something very blurry, more and more blurry).

Gradually it becomes clear that Ridder worked at various levels at a printing firm, going from packing magazines in the mail room up to an executive position, but was happiest in the mail room. The focus is on Ridder's depressed wife, Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot), whose death (not shown), which may or may not have been accidental and for which he feels responsible, moved him to attempt suicide. He also was apparently often unfaithful to Catrine. But one does not know what led to what, or whether moods changed or merely recurred; the random order removes a sense of causality.

The script is by the Belgian sci-fi writer Jacques Sternberg, a prolific scribe who had already long specialized in very short stories to begin with, so penning all these brief scenes, which he declared later to be very autobiographical, fit his talents. Despite the framework of the time-travel experiment, and Resnais' insistence when he spoke of the film that these aren't just "flashbacks," Ridder isn't traveling in time so much as randomly accessing his jumbled, distorted recollections, along with things he only imagines, such as when he mentally inserts multiple mistresses into his bed in place of his wife; when a (potential?) mistress is doubled on either side of him via mirrors; when another pretty girl is seen floating in a bathtub in his office at work; when a little man with a green head appears beside him; or a man talks in a phone booth that's filled with water. One remembers that Belgium, where this transpires, was the home of the surrealist painters Paul Delvaux and René Magritte. The sci-fi story may seem largely just a pretext for all this, its absurdity highlighted by the scientists' initial statement that they're not sure the mouse traveled back in time because it can't talk, and Ridder's reply that they ought to have gotten a talking mouse. But in scenes set later in time Rich loses his smile, and toward the end of the film the scientists become more and more concerned and things build to a sad and dramatic finale, in real time.

One of the things that keeps this film from ever becoming too dry or abstract on the one hand, or (despite the pain of memory) too melodramatic or fantastical on the other, is Claude Rich's light touch as an actor. His emotions seem as flexible as his lithe body. But Resnais has a light touch too, and so perhaps does Sternberg. The white mouse that reappears in Ridder's flashbacks is a sign of the slipperiness of memory, since the mouse is invading from the present, or perhaps time-traveling with Ridder into his past. It also adds a comical note. "What is that mouse doing there?" Catrine asks as the couple lies on the beach.

Among discussions of this film online one on Ed Howard's blog "Only the Cinema" provides a thorough summary and points to themes, with eight stills from the film.

The cinematographer, Jean Boffety, does able work, and the choral tonalities contributed by the noted Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki add a spooky feel to the scientists and their experiment. But surely what's most essential to the effect of the film is the work of the two editors, Albert Jorgenson and Colette Leloup.

Je t'aime, je t'aime, 91 mins., did not screen in competition at Cannes as scheduled due to the festival's shutdown five days before its end in solidarity with the May 1968 nationwide strike; but it had opened theatrically 24 April 1968 in France. The film's ill luck may have led to Resnais' subsequent six-year hiatus in filmmaking (till Stavisky, 1974). It debuted at the New York Film Festival 14 September 1970, with a limited US theatrical release May 1972. It was re-released theatrically in France in 2003, after being shown specially as a tribute at Cannes 2002. It is available on DVD in France, but a US DVD or one with English subtitles does not currently exist. Watched for this review on a screener of the coming Film Forum theatrical re-release, with English subtitles that may be provisional, since they were incomplete and slightly out of sync. The film will run at Film Forum Feb. 14-20, 2014, "in a new 35mm print," with showtimes daily at 1:20, 3:20, 5:20, 7:30, & 9:35.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.