Je t'aime, je t'aime

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.

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

The protagonist of Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime, Claude Ridder, spends the majority of the film adrift in time, randomly surfacing at various moments from a tragic love relationship. The viewer enjoys being flung forwards and backwards in time, to piece together the story...or, not.

The plot owes a huge debt to Chris Marker's far superior La Jetee, in which time-travel, love, and self-knowledge form a closed loop. Je T'Aime, despite its fractured chronology, is in fact more akin to a conventional tragic love story.

Director Renais was born in 1922, making him 46 in 1968 at the time this film was made. I think this is visible: Renais was perhaps too old to really feel and understand the 60s and its anarchic energy. While the film's time machine looks borrowed from "Barbarella", and the time-fracturing sometimes has a psychedelic quality, Renais' world-view is that of a man of the 1950s. (The hero is a WW2 veteran, firmly locating him in an earlier era.) The film is about existential dread, the weight of history, damaged and intractable male subjectivity. Meanwhile in Paris, in May '68, young people were rising up and discovering new forms of life.

The major flaws of the film are Claude Rich's unsympathetic performance as the protagonist, and a script that somehow leaves the love relationship feeling flat.

An interesting thought experiment: if the lead actor had been someone more appealing -- say, Alain Delon, instead of the somewhat weedy and overwrought Claude Rich -- would Je T'Aime be now regarded as a masterpiece? Quite possibly, yes.

For fans of Renais, worth seeking out. Otherwise, treat viewing Je T'aime as an experiment...from which you may or may not return.

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.