Je t'aime, je t'aime

This film's a landmark in french sci-fi. To be honest, french sci-fi can almost be summarized in 'La Jetée', 'Paris n'existe pas' (don't even try to find this one...) and 'Je t'aime, Je t'aime'. Watch the last to catch a glimpse of the process in which Resnais can create a powerful masterpiece out of nothing. The plot's rather simple; a neuropathed mood man (Claude Ridder) who tried to commit suicide is selected by a secret organisation in order to experiment a very dangerous and quite hopeless travel, a journey in his own past. If you ever experienced resnais' border lined cinema, you'll obviously understand that this movie will not use the same old usual vision of time travel, (basically 'where and when' HG Wells stuff ) Formally, try to see it as a sequel of emotional paintings of the hero's past life (more than 150 sequences from 2 seconds to 2 minutes, which may or may not have links between them), about the life which he and his accidentally past away wife Catrine tried to built in the late 60's in Paris. A forced introspection by the most violent and merciless way to revive key moments of his life (re-live them as they happen is the scientific purpose but why not re-live them mixed up with his subjectivity ? How great is the strengh of our past on the present when we have the opportunity to change it ? This film's also about weakness of memories in front of memory's complexity) brought by an organic space machine would of course make the travel more difficult than it is for his companion, an academical white mouse which allow itself to sneak into his past. Human perception of the so-called reality, our ability to create new ones every morning and every time 'self-interrogation about memory and memories' comes from the bottom of forgetfulness to the present moment to change our view on events are described in such a unique and powerful aesthetic way that this piece of cinematograph makes 'Je t'aime, Je t'aime' an unique experiment as 2001 is and will be. No less.

After the political theme of "La guerre est finie",Resnais returns to his familiar subject,time,in all its complexity in this film which is almost as opaque as "Marienbad" or as unsettling as "Muriel".Ridder {Claude Rich,an actor whom Resnais used many times over the years}is a publisher whose girlfriend is accidentally killed and who feels in some way responsible for her death.After listening to a recording by Thelonius Monk,he unsuccessfully attempts suicide after which he has a lengthy recuperation in a hospital .When he leaves,two doctors who have a constructed a time machine ask if he would like to participate in their experiments. Having nothing to lose,he readily agrees and enters the bizarre contraption along with a white mouse,although unlike the fly in Cronenberg's film there is thankfully no genetic mutation involved. He does not travel forward in time,however,but back ,precisely one year to a beach in Brittany.The experiment is supposed to last for a minute but something goes wrong and he is trapped in the machine.Now he experiences a host of memories brought sharply back to life,some important,others banal,in a kaleidoscope of sharply edited images which brings to mind the montages of "Muriel".The theme is reminiscent of many films from "La Jetée" to "The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind" and this rarely seen film is definitely one of the most important of Resnais' career.

Ostensibly buried upon release under the avalanche of the '68 events, a time when the Parisian youths were more keen to plan for a radical future than lament a forlorn past (and perhaps as preparation spent their movietime away from the streets watching Week End or La Chinoise, films that rehearsed their efforts), in this Resnais film we find no eternal sunshines and no spotless minds. We find only memory, this destructive facet of consciousness grinding out its painful cycle of endless returns.

I had anticipated a complex film, it's what fans of it insist, instead it's the most simple of Resnais' features I have seen. We see here a life rearranged out of time, a love affair, a death. We see how the lovers met, what idle or affectionate time they shared on the same bed, how they hoped or thought to communicate and know one another but probably didn't, the man's struggles to maintain the closeness in the relationship and his failure to do so. We see how they grew apart and broke up, and what happened of them.

Resnais' touch is that we don't see any of this in that order, rather as convalescent images relived, as though there might not be pattern there. But once the novelty plays out, he doesn't take it far enough. He has to rely on montage for all this, and acquits himself rather well. When they break up, he doesn't follow the scene with something from older, happier times, the contrast would've been much too easy, instead he gives us an anonymous scene from a time inbetween where she's crying on his shoulder.

It's a simple film only because it comes by the hand of Resnais. In retrospect he was perhaps unlucky to make Hiroshima mon Amour his debut. And as followup, the complete, perfect abstraction of it. What was left for him to go next?

This is not a sci-fi movie in the normal sense of the word. It does not explore futuristic concepts or alien ways of thought. The sci-fi premise is nothing but a framework for a movie interested in seeing what happens if a movie is told entirely at random in little bits and pieces.

After establishing a few science rules, the protagonist is plopped into a brain-shaped tent so he can travel back in time and relive a single minute from a year ago. But once in the past he finds himself jumping from memory to memory. Some memories are a few seconds, some might last a minute. Some connect, some seem to be random.

Many of the moments center around a depressed woman, and the movie is an exploration of her, and him, and whatever surrounds that. There are also moments that are just odd, like an unexplained guy in a Halloween mask.

Unfortunately, none of this is all that interesting. The lead character is a lump and his women seem interchangeable. (For me that is literally the case; I have faceblindness and could not figure out which woman was in which scene, which means this movie was harder for me to follow than it would be for someone who didn't have issues recognizing faces).

The look is as bland as the characters, and the whole thing feels more like an intellectual exercise than a genuine attempt to say something about anything.

After a failed suicide, a young man (Claude Ridder, played by Claude Rich) is recruited as a volunteer in a time travel experiment that appears to leave him temporally disconnected and re-experiencing moments from his past. While clearly a 'science fiction' movie (the actual time machine is an odd organic tent-like structure with a form fitting couch from which the subject disappears and reappears), the time travel element serves only as a biographical framing device as Ridder flicks back and forth in his personal history and the story of his troubled love for depressed Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot) and the events leading to her death and his subsequent suicide attempt unwind in an non-linear, and sometimes repetitive, fashion. Helmed by French New Wave director Alain Resnais, the film has some odd flourishes (in one memory, Ridder is met by a man in formal dress and a 'gill-man' face (mask?)). The film never makes clear whether Ridder is physically in the past as an observer or is revisiting the past by occupying his own body. The mouse that he shares the time machine with does appear occasionally, but no explanation is offered. I am not sure if Claude and Olga's relationship would have been that interesting without the time-travel framework, but perhaps if I had been more attentive to details, I would have found the story less disjointed and more engaging. Interesting more than entertaining, the film is an interesting entry in the limited body of 1960's French Science fiction cinema but anyone expecting another 'Barberella' (1968) will be greatly disappointed. * to borrow Kurt Vonnegut's expression