L'immortale

"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.

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...

A Frenchman, who is a teacher, arrives in Istanbul, and has, or tries to have, a relationship with a mysterious woman in an uncooperative, seemingly threatening, environment.

The dream-like atmosphere of this film will be immediately familiar to those who have had the pleasure of enjoying Last Year at Marienbad (which was written, but not directed, by Robbe-Grillet); and l'Immortelle feels like a cross between that film and The Color of Pomegranates. The mostly stylized acting is perfectly realized by all concerned, young and old alike; and in short there are no rough seams in the fabric of this film. Maurice Barry is at the camera and provides us with beautiful evocative images of features of Istanbul, such as some of its mosques, the old walls of Constantinople, and the Bosporus waterfront.

What happens or doesn't happen? We find that facts never quite marshal into realities. Understanding is non-linear. Imagination profanes experience . . . Or is it the other way around? The film is a lyrical opium-dream, evading the rational as it speaks to the subconscious. Highly recommended.

Alain Robbe-Grillet was the writer of LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, this is one of my favorite movies of all time. I must revisit it though, because there have been many years since i watched it. And Time changes everything.

Robbe- Grillet wrote this movie too. He is the director as well. I liked it but i can understand the reasons why many people won't. It's almost inaccessible. It's too mysterious to call it a mystery movie, i am joking obviously, i just want to emphasize that this is so weird and obscure that i couldn't be sure even if there is a mystery here or a riddle or the creator just plays with viewers' minds. Is there a mystery here to solve or the viewers should just dive in their subconscious, without thinking it too much?

Is Constantinopole a mythical city here, a place that exists only in dreams because in reality, there are all fake, as the female character keeps repeating? Is it just a scenery for our deepest feelings to rise on the surface? Or a "real" city in which bad things and criminal activities are taking place?

I liked this movie because it made me contemplate about many things. Françoise Brion is unbelieavably gorgeous. I loved its narrative and the way that certain scenes keep repeating but not exactly the same. It was like a circle, the end is the beginning is the end. Like a cinematic "Ouroboros". Like Nietzsche's Eternal Return.

I can't rate it higher because it is too cryptic and i am not even sure it is brilliant or the director just being enigmatic for the sake of enigmas. It's more likely this is a STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE movie. Still, if you find it interesting as it was desribed here, watch it.

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.