Je t'aime, je t'aime - Anatomia di un suicidio

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.

After having seen three films of Alain Resnais over the past few years 'Last year at Marienbad, 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' and 'Mon Oncle d'Amerique' I think he is a director well worth the effort to learn a little more about.

Resnais plays with time here and films directly what happens in the conscious of the protagonist. Impossible to place in time and place a linear narrative from the short fragmatic bursts of scenes. Eventually these scenes, disposed and diced, give the mesh or framework leading to his eventual suicide attempt. To make things more confusing it is possible that some scenes are in fact his fantasies and he didn't live them at all.

I like very much films that deal with time and space when handled by great directors. You leave the cinema often slightly confused as you are thrown back into reality. The film calls for a lot of reflection.

"Je T'aime, Je T'aime (1968, Alan Resnais), a rarely-seen science-fiction cult film, exercises the viewer's mind with superb style. As with the films of Jean Luc Godard, "Je T'aime" has a chaotic narrative which oozes with dystopian gloom. The non-linear structure is a bit fatiguing and frustrating. Still, I like it because of the arresting imagery and magnetic cast.

Claude Ridder (played by Claude Rich), who has held many different office jobs, has recently survived a suicide attempt. When leaving the sanitarium, Claude is approached by creepy members of a secret organization which is conducting time-travel experiments. At the remote facility he is encouraged to allow the scientists to transport him back a year in time for a minute. The scientists tell him that they have successfully conducted this experiment with lab mice and now need him for the first human trial. A few days later, Claude and a mouse (in a small container) enter the Time Machine (which looks like a human brain from the outside). The Time Machine (TM) starts up. Woops—it immediately begins skipping like a dirty CD. While the scientists outside the TM lament their inability to stop it, Claude begins reliving short segments of his past randomly without end. He can exit the TM only after decompressing for four minutes; but the endlessly-looping Time Machine keeps interrupting the closing sequence. The repeated perspective of a large brain in the background with anxious scientists in the foreground worried about the brain's condition comments upon brainwashing.

It takes a while, but Claude's often repetitive flashbacks eventually reveal why he attempted suicide. A year ago Claude was on a Scotland vacation when his comely girlfriend Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot) died. The two were an exceptionally attractive couple. Nevertheless, she had been the one was always seriously depressed (long before Claude was). The two represent different types of depression. Catrina seems to be bipolar; while occasionally happy she invariably finds little about life to make her struggle worthwhile. Claude's state of mind is more connected with Catrina's poor mental health and inevitable death. He harbors feelings of guilt out of the belief he killed her.

The world-weary conversation between the two is usually compelling. Some of us wonder how exceptionally beautiful people can ever be suicidal. Catrina's enervated dialogue is even more heart-breaking when we consider that the stunning Olga Georges-Picot is playing herself. In real life, she struggled with depression for decades. (Unlike Claude Ridder's try, Olga Georges-Picot's 1997 suicide attempt did not fail.)

Visually, Resnais is superb. His color choices and use of the entire frame are remarkable. One often has the feeling of being in an art museum when viewing some of the imagery on display. The haunting, Gothic (and possibly Satanic) soundtrack from Krzysztof Penderecki is also very distinctive.

Catrina and Claude both share the belief that life is unendurable and look forward to an end to their suffering. Resnais has a cruel surprise in store for Claude: It turns out there won't be an escape to his torments. Cinephiles who don't mind putting in some effort should find out why. However, if you chose to arrive to the revival theater showing this by Time Machine please make sure it is under warranty.

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?

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.