Smoking/No Smoking

I agree this is one of the best films made in France in the 90's decade : it is one you can view again and again without having completely mapped all the plot.

It is like a maze where one likes to get lost once in a while.

The two french actors are among my favorites. They have such a wide range of possibilities that they make this kind of miracle possible as a two-actor double-film possible ! Of course, this is obviously an "exercise of style", and it has a sort of theater atmosphere. But the theater is a very rich place for passion.

It also makes me think of 18th century french theater like Marivaux which showed so much characters under pressure.

This is one of the most intelligent and elegant movies ever made. And, still, it's funny and somehow happy. Of course, if you don't like minimalism and a playful conception, you will not love it. But you have to see it. Growing old, Alain Resnais becomes younger and fresher. It's far younger than all the Tarantinos. He's more free. Free from the author's giant ego, free from the film-industry mechanics, free from the boredom of 90% of "high" french movies, free from the film-language, free from everything but its own structure. Great actors, great conception. The only limit is that it's too new and too theatrical for the normal viewer. It requires a watcher with the same kind of freedom. Sorry for my broken English. However, You have to see it, really.

Puzzling mess from Alain Resnais.

Resnais's films are always joint works with their usually renowned screenwriters. The truth is that the quality of his films depends a lot on those collaborators.

I'm not quite sure what interest he may have found in Alan Ayckbourn's supposedly witty comedy, but the five-hour-plus result starts out as slightly unfunny stupidity, and after an hour turns into one of the most mind-numbing movies ever made , whose viewing is an unnecessary torture.

The premise of the staging is artificiality: decorated with painted curtains, two actors each representing several characters, forcing the play to be a succession of duets, and the use of makeup, costumes as exaggerated and irritating as the performances.

The reason for this mess cannot be just the stupid game of showing the diversity of developments that can be triggered by minor decisions, or the simple show-off of the actors in different roles. At first we suspect that there must be something more to it, apart from the apparent and irritating stupidity without any substance. But after an hour and a half it seems like that's it, a boring game that promises to continue for another four hours. Inconceivable.

Resnais left us a handful of fine films, always harnessing his eye for brilliant framing and his revolutionary concept of editing, to stage scripts by famous collaborators. But very often, when the starting texts were not particularly valuable, his films remain pedantic exercises in style. Over time he got involved in the most unlikely projects, none more disastrous than this Smoking/no smoking whose possible original interest on stage is totally lost when it goes to the big screen.

In Yorkshire, Toby Teasdale is the alcoholic director of a school and married with two children with Celia Teasdale that is very unhappy. They have a maid, Sylvie Bell, and a guardian and handyman, Lionel Hepplewick, at school. Toby's best friend is Miles Coombes, who is married with three children with the easy Rowena Coombes. Along the years, simple attitudes might have changed their lives.

"Smoking / No Smoking" is an awarded French comedy with a story based on the concept of Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Przypadek" (a.k.a. "Blind Chance") with variations of the lives of characters after the question "What might have happened?" Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi have awesome performances in the roles of several characters. But the movie is too long and excessively boring and talkative. "Smoking" is better that "No Smoking", maybe because in the end I was so tired that I was not paying attention anymore on the screen. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): "Smoking / No Smoking"

Resnais' distinguished Nouvelle Vague career (e.g.: Hiroshima, mon amour - Stavisky - Life is a bed of roses) demands that we give this film our serious consideration. A faithful cinematic version, in French, of a play by the great contemporary English dramatist Alan Ayckbourn, the whole enterprise might appear to superficial critics as an impossibly eccentric undertaking: A quintessentially English comedy of manners turned into a film by an entirely French team! How can two such diverse national temperaments as the Gallic and the English possibly cohabit in any meaningful creative enterprise? Well, this is the challenge, of course, and there were once philistines who thought even Shakespeare could never be attempted en Francais. The interest of this film lies, indeed, very largely in the attempts of all concerned to acculturate themselves to an alien perspective; naturally, the results are mixed, and no-one fluent in English would want to deprive themselves of the version originale. However, a talented group of French actors succeed commendably, on the whole, in communicating the very particular English humour of the play. For this chance to increase their repertoire, the actors have to thank Resnais, whose choice of Ayckbourn was far from merely eccentric. He has obviously recognised in the Englishman a person who is as typically obsessed as himself with opening up narrative structure, and in finding more creative ways to tell a story. Though a very strange hybrid (especially for an Anglophone!) the enterprise is no monstrous abortion, but actually a very elegant and worthwhile tribute by our neighbours across La Manche. This is a most attractive film version of Ayckbourn's drama. It even succeeds in retaining a great deal of the downright hilarity of the original, which, in their plays, the fellow-countrymen of Shakespeare have learned early to intermix with the sadder side of life. In other words, we have here a suitably touching, hilarious and clever, and, moreover, a fascinatingly unexpected, version of a great original. Authentic Ayckbourn, comme Resnais authentique. Shame on us in Britain that it is not commercially available here!