Mélo

The title is a chic abbreviation for 'melodrama', of which there's no shortage in this urbane period piece about a lovelorn musician enjoying an affair with the wife of his best friend. Director Alain Resnais makes no attempt to open up Henry Bernstein's 1929 stage play or hide its theatrical trappings, going so far as to fade in and out of a shot of closed curtains between each 'act'. The story offers plenty of food for thought, but the nuances of each relationship are undermined by the often dry and detached script readings, punctuated by moments of deliberate histrionic overkill, most of them provided by (an all-too animated) Sabine Azema, playing the wife of one man and mistress to another. Nevertheless it's a welcome return to Earth for an erstwhile pioneer of some of the most opaque French New Wave cinema, showing a subtlety rare even for such highbrow entertainment.

If the chief merit of Last Year at Marienbad was to hypnotize the viewer with a story that may or may not have happened or be happening, director Alan Resnais achieved the same effect fifteen years later with Melo, a trite play from the boulevard theatre of Paris. The eternal triangle, wrapped in pretentious dialogue which was the trade mark of playwright Henry Bernstein. To admire Resnais achievement, one has only to look at the previous film from the same source: Paul Czinner's Dreaming Lips (1936)starring his elfin-like wife Elisabeth Bergner, a very good melodramatic film with a magnificent work by Miss Bergner and Raymond Massey, but nothing more. The Resnais film hypnotizes you and forbids you to apart your eyes from the screen, simply by moving the camera among the characters in close-up after close-up, while they deliver an extremely intelligent but not specially profound dialog. A six-minute close up of André Dussolier while he tells a story, is only one of the astounding achievements of the director in treating a film as if it were a play and at the same time treating a play as if it were a film. We have even a curtain between the acts. But the marvelous camera movements make all the difference. I know nothing about Sabine Azema (except that she won the French Cesar award for her work in this film) but certainly her performance in Melo is something that anybody would like to tell about to his grandchildren. The film is slow, but you don't feel it as slow, because all the performers are taking their work seriously, and giving their best to their parts. Melo proves that Alain Resnais is a true artist. Many have tried to do something like Melo, but only Resnais has succeeded. I must be fair and declare here that I did not care a bit for Hiroshima mon Amour.

For someone who made his name as an avant gardist and surfer of the New Wave Alain Resnais seems to be a closet dernier gardist with a penchant for stilted boulevard theater of another age. In his current release, Pas Sur le bouche he preserves almost intact an operetta from a bygone age and here, as long ago as 1986, he ploughs a similar furrow and even uses two actors from his regular repertory - Arditi and Azema - who will re-surface in Pas sur le bouche. Assuming that oiling the wheels of creaky vehicles is worth doing at all then Resnais does it as well as anyone and it would be bordering on the impossible to assemble a cast containing, in addition to Sabine Azema, Pierre Arditi (to say nothing of his sister), Fanny Ardant and Andre Dussolier and not produce a finished product worth watching. It also says a lot for panellists and juries that one of them saw fit to bung Azema a major Best Actress gong for her work here. It's difficult to nominate an audience for this but it would seem to be pitched at something between the semi-precious Gilbert Adair crowd and the popcorn brigade. 7/10