jon1410

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.

Celine is a young novitiate nun who is sent out of the nunnery by her Mother Superior because she is too full of self-love, is too extremist, mistakes abstinence for martyrdom, she needs to test her faith in the real world. Everything she goes through is an attempt to get closer to God. Her novitiate name is Hadewijch, after the 13th century mystic. She's seen at home in the Ile Saint Loue, in a lavish dwelling in modern day Paris with her dog, lounging about or strolling through the corridors and rooms of her affluent parent's, her father a minister, her mother detached, Celine seems alienated. She meets Yassine, a young street thief from the projects, who takes her to a punk concert and realizes she's not interested in sex with him. She pledges herself to Christ and has the mystic's desire to draw closer to His body. Yassine thinks(rightly?)she's nuts, being the only normal person(and very funny)in the story. When she puts her head on his shoulder, he asks does she want love? Dumont does not explore her character: how she became so religious, the roots of her antagonism with her father.Celine is infatuated with God.

She attends a church where Bach is being played by a quartet and is uplifted by it. Sokolowski's face filled with an inner radiance.Yassine breaks the law, steals a motor-bike and goes through red lights with Celine on the back. He introduces her to his older brother Nassir, who is a devout Muslim, and gives talks in the back of a kebab shop about Islamic belief. He can't understand why she suffers for the 'love' of God, she 'must act if you have faith...continue the creator's work'. He says 'innocence' doesn't exist in a democracy, where people vote but take no responsibility. God is a 'sword for truth and justice'. He takes her to an Arabic country to see the humiliation inflicted. She meets a group of terrorists. She declares herself 'with' Nassir, saying she's 'ready' to fight the cause as a way of getting closer to God. We are given to understand she plants a bomb in Paris. There is a street explosion, she travels below on a tube train with Nassir. We take it she was the 'chosen' one. Police go to the convent to ask her questions, but she escapes, pursued by the demons of self-doubt, in the absence of God.

Celine torments herself in her search for God. Julie Sokolowski embodies the ingenue otherworldliness and childlike candour of Celine, with a wan-faced pallor, a bodily awkwardness, suggesting her vulnerability. Her fear that she has paid too high a price, feeling no closer to God, for her actions. Dumont's camera is usually at head height and fairly close up, moving through landscapes in long shots. David, a shirtless Mason and convict on parole who has been working in the convent grounds, comes to play a major part in Celine's salvation as a form of embodied grace. In a world without God there is still the need for the sacred and the spiritual. Dumont shows various forms of fanaticism merging. God is in the humanity of our ordinary, modern world. Dumont takes us on a journey with Celine, the film as mystical act, a poem not to be interpreted at face value, with surrealistic ellipses and lacunae, reason breaking down, we take things on faith. Dumont makes us empathise with Celine. The ending is a problem, instead of signing off with an act of terrorism, Dumont brings in a miraculous climax, the coda a mystery of love, to send you out the door with too many questions in your head. Disturbing, haunting, cathartic.