Storytelling
This is part of an ongoing series of articles on Alain Resnais. The Museum of the Moving Image will present a Resnais retrospective in early 2011.
The French New
Wave is justly famous for many things, many cultural currents and tidal
fluctuations and siroccos, but when we talk about the law firm of Godard
Truffaut Rivette Chabrol Resnais Demy Varda Marker & Rohmer, we don’t
usually hear ourselves talking about arcanities. Romance, meta-film, rock ’n’
roll, lost youth, indie pioneering, sure—but not mysteries, even though the movement was filthy with them, from Godard’s self-autopsying
indeterminacy to Rivette’s dream-time paranoia park to Resnais’s most famous
narrative contraptions, devices whose elaborate purposes are just beyond
understanding. Which is all to say that these are movies at their moviest—the
seminal Art Film thrust (not just the French, thanks) took movies as an
alternate universe that mirrors our own, but which in the mirroring disconnects
experience from our complacent knowledge of life.
Alain Resnais
has had a varied and seemingly unsummarizable career, reverse-graduating from
puzzle-movie superstar in the 1960s to an aging doodler in the ’90s and beyond,
happier in his later years and indulgent in his love of theater and
gamesmanship, and rarely less than beguiling, but certainly marginal as a world
figure. Perhaps it has seemed thus because, unlike Godard and Rivette, his
films do not bellow with the peculiar obsessions of a distinct personality—yet
the lack of bellowing is misleading. The unsolvables persist, and gain luster.
For those of us who have wondered where Resnais has gone all these years,
who’ve wondered at the fluffy frivolity of Life Is a Bed of Roses (1983) or I Want to Go Home (1989), who may have reconsidered Hiroshima,
mon amour (1959) and Last
Year at Marienbad
(1961), not to mention Mon Oncle d’Amérique (1980), as primarily the achievements of their
screenwriters—for these wondering doubters comes Resnais’s new film like a
gift. Wild Grass
(2009), made when Resnais was 87, is a simple and self-amused ode to
menopausal angst, and yet it is the Resnais hornbook, the secret key to his
sensibility.
Controlled by a wry, quizzical narration, the movie starts by fetishistically following
the impulsive shopping escapades of an anonymous woman (Resnais vet Sabine
Azéma, with a great nimbus of red frizz, although we don’t see her clearly
until later), during which she is mugged of her purse. Meanwhile, a grizzled
and wary older man, Georges (André Dussollier), has his watch battery changed
at a nearby shop—and both he and Resnais treat the occasion as if it were a
scene from an espionage scenario that remains unwritten. In a parking garage,
he finds the woman’s discarded wallet—and so it begins.
Too
many film reviewers in the U.S. noticed only the hero’s
age and his accumulating, irrational interest in Marguerite, Azéma’s winsome,
middle-aged dentist (!), from whom a thanks-for-returning-my-wallet phone call
is just not enough. (“You disappoint me,” he tells her.) But Resnais’s comedy
is hardly a Vertigo-lite
riff or tale of sensual obsession. Consider the details: how Dussollier’s
comfortably bourgeois husband (his wife, played by Anne Consigny, is 17 years
his junior) battles thoughts of savage impulse killing that seem like daydreams
he idly wishes he could act upon. How Marguerite is not only a fetching,
carrot-top tooth-driller but an aviatrix, introducing the possibility of a
flight and a crash into the story just as the appearance of a gun in a movie,
any movie, indicates an eventual shooting. How Mathieu Amalric shows up as the
most unlikely French policeman ever, sparring with both Georges and Marguerite
about “the situation” as if the movie’s very narrative suspension depended upon
it. How the air of the film seems filled with the magic of happenstance even
though nothing seems coincidental.
What’s going
on? Most of the film is overtaken with Georges’s life as it is—uneventful and
unbothered by work—and as it is disrupted, mildly and then radically, by his
dogged pursuit of Marguerite, for reasons unclear. He stalks her, phones her,
leaves messages, bugs Amalric’s cop about her, and through it all his wife is
strangely tolerant. But it’s that “You disappoint me” call that sends up
flares: what Georges is doing is seeking story. He’s a character on the prowl
for plot, desiring to make movie sense out of arbitrariness. Here, what he
seems to want is the kind of fantastical emotional connection that movies and
fiction often use as shortcuts to invest relationships and lives with
meaning—and he doesn’t get it.
Georges’s
airy, Romantic passion plays almost like a kind of Alzheimer’s—except it’s the
rest of the world that won’t cohere into a genre construction, not his
inability to recall or grasp connections. (“Nobody ever dies from reading,” the
narrator offhandedly remarks at one point. “Reading helps us live.”) He’s a
modern Scheherazade, fending off mortality with the erection of fictions
(except he is both the yarn-spinner and the king). Eventually, the lust for
narrative drives Georges to slash Marguerite’s car tires, thereby genuinely
involving the police and launching a new story arc Georges didn’t anticipate.
From there the
movie goes quietly nuts, scrambling genres (the end credits change
genre-signaling styles five times), tossing grand romantic gestures, suffering
the characters as they hesitantly try to figure out what they’re supposed to do
in the story Georges has in his head, a fictional schema the movie finally
succumbs to, after a lot of flirting. It’s the only romantic comedy ever made
in which only its hero is aware of the brand, and the other characters often
resist it. When Marguerite tells Georges to bring his wife along
for a flight—a situation he and we can easily imagine as an amorous movie
turning point without the wife—Georges is furious, as if she’d gone completely
off script.
It’s a
singularly enlarging, inspiring idea—how meaning in life can be found within
story, and how story is memory and how it is in fact all we have, whether the
stories be cinematic formulas like those that Georges harbors, or something completely different, waves and particles of experience that, however
they’re shaped, make up our histories. Suddenly, all of Resnais crystallizes
around a single, poignant, frankly lovable conceit: the pursuit of story as a
way to understand living. The zombies in Last Year in Marienbad are the most woeful practitioners of
Resnais’s thesis, memory-impaired and helplessly failing to arrange a
meaningful narrative for their lives. The lovers in Hiroshima, mon amour, the war-haunted Parisians of Muriel (1963), the windblown leaf of a time
traveler in Je t’aime, je t’aime
(1968), the sociology professor in Mon Oncle d’Amérique, the couples in Mélo (1986), and so on. Resnais’s people are
all contrivers of meaning, tale-tellers compelled like Beckett’s ghosts to
build and rebuild the scaffolding of memory and history as a way of insisting
on their own significance.
All of which frames Resnais in a special way vis-à-vis his New Wave compatriots. Whereas for Godard the living image and its independent ephemerality was the way movies most vitally related to life, for Resnais it was very nearly the opposite: cinema’s capacity for narrative order. Of course, Resnais rarely if ever simply indulged in that capacity, like most movies have, but interrogated and explored it at every turn, and pointedly gazed upon our pining need for that narrative order, and nodded with wizened sympathy.
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THE AUTHOR
Michael Atkinson is the author/editor of six books, including Ghosts in the Machine: Speculating on the Dark Heart of Pop Cinema (Limelight Eds., 2000), Flickipedia (Chicago Review Press, 2007), Exile Cinema: Filmmakers at Work Beyond Hollywood (SUNY Press, 2008), and the novels from St. Martin's Press Hemingway Deadlights and Hemingway Cutthroat.
More articles by Michael AtkinsonAuthor's Website: Zero for Conduct