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

Resnais is haunted by time and memory(viz:- Hiroshima Mon Amour,Muriel, Last Year in Marienbad). Je t'aime, je t'aime, is his attempt to revisit a man's memory of his past love who committed suicide, through a sci-fi framework. A group of researchers have built a time machine and have sent as mouse back in time for 1 minute. However they need a human subject, one who having survived suicide, has nothing to lose. He wants to return to a time when he was at his happiest with his beloved, Catrine. Claude ( Claude Rich) becomes hopelessly lost and unstuck in time, as the machine jumps from one memory to another, in the process something goes wrong, and the patient's memories become fragmented, uncoiling in bits and pieces, out of order, sometimes looping back again and again. In the process, we see relationship come together and fall apart, and the tragic nature of what we're watching isn't clear until the final moments. The question is, did Resnais film the memories in the same random order that the novelist, Jacques Sternberg, wrote them? Moment to moment, we're unclear of what we're seeing even when it seems so simple, so plain. As the narrative continues to spin around like a zoetrope, a visit to the beach or a quiet conversation in bed acquires new meanings as the film progresses. It's as much a love story, or a science-fiction story, as it is a story about storytelling itself, and continues on themes which Resnais has treated before. The surreality of each image and scene, lies like shattered glass. We're left to put the pieces back together, tracing the rapturous highs and turbulent lows of his relationship with his girlfriend Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot). Ridder is trapped in an isolated world of his own fractured, infinitely repeating memories.

Resnais captures the seemingly mundane rituals of everyday life-dead time- that define the essence of human existence. Ridder's unremarkable life is presented in terse and abstract episodes that, although also eschewing narrative, inherently illustrate a complexity of form, experience, tactility, and emotional realism. In the end, it is the film's organic ability to convey depth and texturality that elicits pathos and humanity for the deeply flawed, alienated, modern day tragic hero imprisoned by the eternal torment of his inescapable, haunted memories.This is a remarkable film-a link between Marker's La Jetée and Gondry's The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-which doesn't quite come off, as you can't quite pin-point the moment the lover's drifted apart. A cubist structure is built up from a man's life cut in pieces. It's compelling technically, not emotionally: Claude is a neurotic daydreamer, and can't effect any changes, washed on the tides of fractured memory like a jellyfish.Like the haunting image of the mouse at the end the self is trapped in a glass cage, gasping for air. An astringent artistry is at play behind it all.

Resnais' LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD is one of the greatest movies i've ever watched. I've watched also COEURS but i don't remember it clearly, i think i liked it. "Je t'aime, je t'aime" is inferior to them. I didn't feel anything, supposedly this is a tragic story with a a couple that once felt in love for each other and then, something happened. However, the leading character was too bland and kinda boring and the whole story was not that interesting as you think, reading the synopsis. This is a brilliant and original plot and so many movies have copied it (ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF A SPOTLESS MIND, COMET by Sam Esmail etc). I respect this, hence the 7 stars. But i couldn't emotionally connect with it. It fell flat, even though there were a few intense moments. This is too "celebral" i believe, more brilliant/intellectual than exciting. If you love art movies, you should definitely watch it. At least, this is not confusing/chaotic at all, it's totally accesible.

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.