L'Eden et après

Too artsy but the sex is okay. Scorpions are cool too.

Director, Alain Robbe-Grillet clearly had a liking for young ladies in very short mini dresses and their being chased and sometimes caught and sometimes more. Well he films this so beautifully and has such a beautiful lead in Catherine Jourdan that it is hard to object too much. I understand this was inspired by composer Schoenberg's original twelve tone technique and so there are a number (twelve actually) elements of narrative with repetition but I'm not sure I'm too interested in all that. The film is wonderful to look at, at all times and has some sort of narrative flow but it can be an effort to stay with it because nothing ever seems to be resolved or made very clear. The director, of course wrote Last Year at Marienbad and the pretty young Jourdan appeared with Marianne Faithful in, Girl on a Motorcycle.

Yikes, talk about self-indulgent. It does start off quite frighteningly as a girl is ambushed in an office by a group of colleagues and stripped on what looks like a sacrificial table! Then we discover that it's nothing more than a bunch of bored and wired students who have nothing better to do than play their own version of psycho-cleudo. Then they encounter the enigmatic "Duchemin" (Pierre Zimmer) who regales them with stories of his time in North Africa and of a special powder that could change their lives for ever. Gullible as they are, off we head to some beautifully pristine Tunisian seaside adobe homes where the rest of this plays out. Surreal is putting the rest of this mildly, so don't be looking for anything akin to a traditional plot as the group start to hallucinate and partake in some real Marquis de Sade kind of stuff. Perhaps it's meant to be erotic - but nudity in itself (almost exclusively female) is not necessarily sexy nor provocative. For the last half hour or so, you could easily be forgiven for thinking you're watching a "Playboy" shoot. To be fair, the randomness and unpredictability does work at times and the whole thing keeps you on your toes for a while, but as it gets towards what passes for a conclusion, I felt that perhaps I'd have volunteered for one of the venomous little scorpions that may (or, of course, may not) have featured earlier. It's far too long, far too slow and no attempt is made to develop any form of characterisation amongst these pretty introspective young folks who are easy pickings for their new mentor. It's was showcased at the abandoned 1970 Berlinale and though I am glad I watched it, I shall never bother watching it again.

I knew of novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet chiefly by virtue of his script for Alain Resnais’ art-house masterpiece LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD (1961; which I intend to revisit in tribute to the author). Eventually, I became aware of his own films as a director via a thread on “The Latarnia Forums” – which, back then, had intrigued me a great deal and, in fact, was highly pleased to acquire three of them a few months ago. Unfortunately, the prints were incredibly murky – so I kind of lost my enthusiasm and it’s only now, in honor of his passing, that I made a concentrated effort to stick with them!

However, my first encounter with these titles proved a disappointment: as I said, the picture quality left a lot to be desired – but, frankly, so did the film itself! Judging by the celebrated Resnais work, I knew I’d be in for an oblique and possibly multi-layered piece – however, to be honest, I found it made little sense and that it was generally weird for weirdness’ sake! In fact, if I had to compare Robbe-Grillet’s style here with that of contemporaneous film-makers, I’d say this is Godard meets Antonioni meets Jodorowsky!; that, in itself, would sound like a most interesting proposition to some…but, I assure you, the film is a bit of a bore despite plenty of nudity (the writer-director seems to have a thing for sadomasochism, as can also be seen from TRANS-EUROP-EXPRESS [1966]) and a stunning-looking heroine in Catherine Jourdan (sporting cropped blonde hair).

The plot, such as it is, has to do with a group of disaffected students who are shown a way out of their ennui (via a concoction he offers) by a man they meet at a café (the Eden of the title); Jourdan is supposed to have a night-time tryst with him at a factory but, on arriving for the appointment, she is intimidated by some of her fellow students and finds the man dead! Taking a clue from a postcard of an Arabian town found in the stranger’s pocket, Jourdan gets mixed-up in espionage (the MacGuffin in this case being a valuable missing portrait), games of a sexual nature, drug-induced hallucinations and murder; eventually, we come full circle and the story returns to the Eden and the arrival once again of the stranger...

The four out of ten rating is because, despite the slick, pretty surfaces of attractive youth and whitewashed Tunisian buildings, the film is so pretentious that the viewer soon loses interest in what it might all mean.More seriously, though, we are now living in a more enlightened age when the casual dehumanization of women, whether in the work of the filmmakers or in their off screen lives, has become unacceptable.some of this has been overdone, as iñ the cancel culture of Woody Allen, Roman Polanski and Jim Toback leading to the suppression of seeing their latest movies. But people seem to have forgotten how an esteemed French man of letters was able to trade off of sadism toward women in his work, and get away with it.there was already a warning in Robbe Grillet 's "Marenbad" script when the woman kept telling the man to leave her alone and he kept harassing her.Now in the 1970 film we get women stripped, assaulted, put in cages, whipped, tortured with scorpions, you name it.not that much different from what the Bush administration did to suspected terrorists at Guantanamo after 9-11.and some phony intellectuals lap it up and are titillated.