Je t'aime, je t'aime

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.

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.

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?

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