L'immortelle

While the print of this one was more pleasing than the other Robbe-Grillet titles I watched to commemorate his recent passing, the viewing itself was marred by a couple of instances of temporary freezing. The film, then, was perhaps the most pretentious and, well, tedious of the lot – given that there’s hardly any discernible plot!

Again, we’re thrown into a remote Arabian locale (complete with relentless – and, consequently, extremely irritating – religious chanting) with, at its centre, a glamorous yet vapid femme fatale in Francoise Brion – to whom the title is presumably referring. Frankly, I’m at pains to recall just what went on in the film – even if only a little over 36 hours have elapsed since then…which is never a good thing but, usually, this is a predicament I find myself in after having watched some mindless/low-brow action flick and not a respected art-house one! What’s certain is that, as a film about the search for a missing enigmatic girl, it’s far less compelling and satisfying than Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA (1960)! Incidentally, the bewildered hero of THE IMMORTAL ONE is played by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze – who happens to be a film-maker in his own right, actually one of the lesser (and, therefore, least-known) exponents of the “Nouvelle Vague”.

Though I have to admit that – in the long run – I was disappointed by the mini-marathon dedicated to this influential novelist and highbrow film-maker, I’d still be interested in checking out the other efforts he directed (not to mention hope to catch these three again in better representations and, perhaps, a more amenable frame-of-mind). In any case, I still have Alain Resnais’ demanding but highly-acclaimed LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD (1961) – which Robbe-Grillet wrote, and for which he even garnered an Oscar nomination – to re-acquaint myself with, and that is sure to be an infinitely more rewarding experience...

Robbe-Grillet's brilliant first film, just a year after writing the screenplay for Last year in Marienbad (so detailed that it's impossible not to assign autorship of the film as much to him as to Alain Resnais).

It is interesting to compare the two works, and to note that the narrative and structural innovations of the film directed by Resnais are a constant in Robbe-Grillet's work, both literary and cinematographic. Unfortunately, the stupid author theory has always privileged the director over the screenwriter.

Resnais certainly endowed Last year in Marienbad with an incredible visual sophistication, an elegance and beauty in the images and an affectation in the interpretations, and it is true that his previous and subsequent work shows an absolute harmony with the material. Also, more importantly, he developed unprecedented abilities in editing. But underneath this cosmetics and this fascinating packaging, the constants of Robbe-Grillet's work underlie.

L'immortelle is more abrupt, more visually direct, obsessed with space-time raccord discontinuities, but also based on disorientation, on falsehoods, on the reworkings of the mind, on the repetition of the same images with different meanings, on the transforming capacity of the memory. It is, yes, much warmer and more sensual, renouncing the icy formal perfection that results so much in distance in Resnais's work.

That sensuality, will lead in later works of Robbe-Grillet more and more in an annoying sadomasochistic aberration, and in an undoubted misogyny that reaches the delusional.

In L'Immortelle, a suspicious and unexpressive protagonist finds himself trapped in a fantasy that involves a woman and a city, both equally mysterious, deceitful and beautiful, in the threatening presence of a controlling corporation made up of neighbors, street vendors, bar customers, fishermen, led by a sinister character with sunglasses and accompanied at all times by a couple of imposing dogs.

The scenes, as in all of the auteur's films, matter for themselves, for the narrative paths they seem to open, for where they point, rather than as links in a linear story that does not exist. Robbe-Grillet centers them on clichés of the most commercial and serial cinema, flattering the viewer's imagination, as if it were a noir or mistery film, using exotic and fascinating sets ( in this case Istanbul shows all its mystery, its fascination, its decadent charm, its supposedly threatening background, and its most picturesque corners). But time and again Robbe-Grillet ends up disenchanting the viewer, or leaving him in suspense, when everything is shown as a simple decoy, as a false trail that leads nowhere.

The film could suffer from a story that is too basic and is assumed to be unimportant, a simple starting point for Robbe-Grillet juggling, which can be a bit tiresome in the middle of the film. But Robbe-Grillet knows when to take the puzzle apart to assemble the pieces differently, and thereby regain the attention of the possibly distracted viewer in time.

Robbe-Grillet would continue down this same path, breaking down soap opera stories into increasingly clever and cerebral games, but also stripping female leads more and more naked, and subjecting them to increasingly unacceptable mistreatment and torture.

"Immortal" is an odd word for a film which is a chronicle of two characters' deaths foretold. Alain Robbe-Grillet's directorial debut has the circular dream logic and preordained destinies often found in his later films. The heroine (Francoise Brion) may not be physically tied up, unlike actresses in his S&M-heavy later features, but she is just as trapped. The enigmatic, surrealistic, non-linear story-telling remains a breath of fresh air, but the abuse of stereotypes (e.g., exoticizing the Istanbul settings and associating all Turkish men with Ottoman Harems) makes _L'Immortelle_ feel dated.

_L'Immortelle_ sends me back to _Last Year at Marienbad_. Resnais's 1961 film, with screenplay solely credited to Robbe-Grillet, probably sheds light on what the latter intended in his own directorial work; the differences are telling too.

I haven't seen _Marienbad_ in decades.

After this viewing, it strikes me as an author wrestling with a fictional heroine who has a mind of her own. He imposes his words and memory on her, strangles the last drop of autonomy out of his invention, tries to bully her into submission by the sheer force of repetition (although the narrator seems to get confused by his own voice too!). In fact, Robbe-Grillet has published 4 well-regarded, avant garde novels by 1961. In this respect, _L'Immortelle_ is like _Marienbad_. There are numerous other similarities in the acting styles of the supporting characters, the tracking shots, and the editing.

The main difference is the actress playing the heroine. Robbe-Grillet supposedly didn't like Delphine Seyrig for _Marienbad_; in his own film 2 years later he chose the voluptuous Francoise Brion for her pliant poses. There would be plenty more such vacant female characters in _The Beautiful Prisoner_, _Playing with Fire_, _Gradiva_ ...

The slim, bird-like Seyrig cannot be more different. With her head tilted, her sharp elbow folded at acute angles, and her even sharper guffaw, she wordlessly creates a counter-narrative. This must be why Resnais picked her. (Seyrig also starred in the almost-as-ambiguous _India Song_. Elizabeth Debicki, who loves to tilt her long frame, may be Seyrig's spiritual descendent.)

It would be unfair to compare the image quality of _Marienbad_ and _L'Immortelle_, since I streamed the latter off Tubi. No one can match the early Resnais's tracking shots, but _L'Immortelle_ is certainly well framed and thought-provoking.

Watch it while you still can on Tubitv.

This was the first film to be directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet, who also wrote it. This was two years after his historic collaboration (as writer) with Alain Resnais (as director) in making the famous LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1961), which is certainly one of the highest achievements of world cinema. As a novelist, Robbe-Grillet was one of the founding members of the school known as the Nouveau Roman (New Novel). When I was a student I read a couple of those novels and found them very difficult and artificial. But his visions of things worked much better on film, so it is not surprising that he turned to the medium of cinema, which suited him so much more. And the worldwide success of MARIENBAD gave him the boost of fame necessary to raise the funding for this, his first film as director. Strangely enough, I have somewhere a letter which Robbe-Grillet wrote to me early in 1963, when I was still at university, so that I was in touch with him at the very time this film was emerging. Robbe-Grillet was so powerfully influenced by Surrealism that he may himself be safely described as Late Surrealist. This film, set in Istanbul, is strongly Surrealist in every respect. But he was doubtless deeply influenced also by a novel set in Istanbul by Claude Farrère (1876-1957), L'homme Qui Assassina (The Man Who Killed), which has been filmed six times: in 1913, 1920, twice in French in 1931 and once in German in 1931, and in Spanish in 1932. Farrère also emphasized the timeless and exotic dream-like quality of Istanbul in his weird mystery novel. He was intimately acquainted with Istanbul prior to the First World War, and he evoked its magic, secrecy, and intrigue from his own experiences there. I may be one of the few people left alive in the English-speaking world who has actually read that strange and haunting book, but I suspect that Robbe- Grillet knew it well and had seen at least one of the French films of the story. L'IMMORTELLE has such overwhelmingly spectacular cinematography of the ruins and mysteries of Istanbul that anyone interested in the city needs to see it for that reason alone. In one weird scene, two of the characters pass in a rowboat across the famous Byzantine underwater cistern, and one could never do such a thing today. But this film was made in an easier time, 1962, when many of the old Ottoman wooden houses still remained, and Istanbul was still not only a place of mystery but a location steeped in antiquity at every turn. The story, or what passes for a story (for it has no beginning middle or end), is a meditation upon the immortality of the mystery of Woman., in other words The Immortal Woman. Robbe-Grillet chose as this elusive muse the actress Francoise Brion. Unfortunately, she is but a pale imitation of the haunting and thoroughly magical Delphine Seyrig, who played such a similar role in MARIENBAD. Robbe-Grillet wanted another Seyrig but he got only a partial one, for she looks too knowing, and instead of exuding an atmosphere of impenetrable mystery and representing a total enigma, Brion does not fool us, for we know she is only acting. (Whether Seyrig was acting or instead becoming possessed by a spirit we do not know.) People expecting a coherent narrative will get neither coherence nor a narrative. But that is intentional and is part of what it means to be a Surrealist. A true Surrealist never explains, he suggests, mystifies, and leaves you wondering. Of course, there are many story elements in the film nevertheless, it is just that we never learn what they all mean. Why is there a man wearing sunglasses at dead of night holding two snarling hounds of hell? Why do the main characters keep walking around an ancient Turkish cemetery and intoning their thoughts about life and death to each other? Why is there a car crash which keeps repeating, and with different people inside? Why is there an intense romance which keeps dissolving and re-forming like a shifting mist? And meanwhile the camera glides along in endless travelling shots showing us the endless ancient walls, the palaces and fortresses along the Bosphorus, and the courtyards of old mosques. Brion attempts to show le Néant ('nothingness', a fashionable Existentialist notion at the time this film was made) on her face, but her eyes do not go dead enough, they do not glaze over properly. She dresses stylishly, always in new outfits. She is in the bedroom, then she is on a boat, sometimes laughing, sometimes staring emptily, then she is on her knees inside a mosque, then on a boat again smiling enigmatically, and then a dog barks savagely, and she keeps insisting 'Je suis libre' ('I am free'). All the mysteries of this film are unsolved, because they stand for Life and for Love, neither of which is ever solved and neither of which ever ends.

In Alain Robbe-Grillet's screenplay for 'Last year at Marienbad' the Woman is 'A' and the Man is 'X'. Here she is 'L' and he is 'N'. They are played by Francoise Brion and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze. He helped to found 'Cahiers du Cinema' and was evidently a highly respected member of the New Wavelet brigade but judged solely as an actor he is lamentably lacking. In fact the phrase 'charisma bypass' springs to mind. There is at least a chemistry between him and the enigmatic, erotic Brion which is hardly surprising as they were husband and wife!

This is Robbe-Grillet's directorial debut and is a cinematic continuation of Le Nouveau Roman which avoids linear narrative. This results in a film that is by turns fascinating and frustrating. He and his cinematographer Maurice Barry have certainly made the most of the exotic locations and the glorious architecture but that isn't quite enough to hold our attention for its hundred minute length. The images of 'L' in lingerie and the incredibly sexy Turkish dancer are sure to 'arouse ones interest' for want of a better term.

This film serves to remind us if indeed we need reminding, that in the hands of the Eternal Feminine the male of the species is so much putty. I am pleased to have seen this stylish and in some respects mesmerising film but am in no hurry to see it again, unless perhaps to revisit the Turkish dance!