User reviews

The question I ask above is I think necessary. Thanks to the BFI bringing out six of his films in an essential boxset some at least in the UK can question this as well. Why were his books read when his films remained practically unknown here ? Is the written word easier than the image ? Certainly in this complex film, ' L'homme qui Ment ' it is much less sexually provocative than some of his others, so why in 1968 was it not noticed ? Set in a country at war a man played well by Jean-Louis Trintignant has either betrayed his best friend to the enemy or he has not. He goes back to the ( betrayed ? ) man's town and finds the women closest to the man, all seemingly quite happy in a heterosexual man's fantasy of lesbian desire. No more spoilers. The images are startling and only a genius, as Robbe-Grillet was, could have created them. Certain scenes remind the viewer that he wrote ' Last Year at Marienbad ' for Alain Resnais, and the soundtrack is composed of metallic sounds ( war ? ) and normal sounds of bells interspersed with gunshots, and the film is extraordinary on the sound level alone. There is also a Gothic feel with forests, and a castle with endless corridors and all this adds to the total atmosphere. I have watched this film several times and it still remains a mystery, where lies could be the truth and the so-called truth lies. So why not a 10 ? Personally I believe his written word is better than his cinema. For me the repetition in his written fictions are more exciting to visualise in my mind than seeing repetitive images on a screen. But Robbe-Grillet was one of the finest creators in the arts, and that is why his cinema should not have been ignored ( or banned ) in the UK for so long a time.

The paranoia of the self-perceiving mind was the basis of a kind of literary movement in France for a while. An amalgam of surrealism, popular psychology, and war trauma - Robbe-Grillet was one of its notables. Here, Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a kind of memory-muse, returning to a village occupied by the Germans after the war, purporting, at first, to be a missing resistance hero, but is rebuffed by the locals and constantly changes his story while making a laconic play for the man's widow, sister and maid.

The Sapphic trio of women are the film's chief feature, the camera picking out hundreds of gorgeous poses as they prowl uncertainly around bare rustic interiors. Trintignant underplays it, playfully, as does the director. It's never solemn, with dazzling washed-out images. A picturesquely shabby Czech village seemed to have been commandeered for the production.

The mutating story of the man and his fabrications, and the meaning behind it - presumably guilt - is less interesting than the creativity in the visuals, which are never less than striking, and in the editing, which is sheer artistic genius.