L'impossible objet

Such a weird movie but if you pay attention it's a John frankenheimer masterpiece!

It's oddly appropriate that John Frankenheimer's Story of a Love Story was never properly released, and is very hard to see now - the title suggests a distancing (if not plain redundancy), whereas the alternative title Impossible Object threatens to disappear altogether. The love story, if such it is, is between an English writer (Alan Bates, in provocative, improvisatory-feeling form) living in France with an American wife and a houseful of kids, and the French wife (Dominique Sanda, one of the most beguilingly watchful of actresses ) of an older French husband, mother of a single daughter. The film moves around within their timeline of their relationship, further destabilizing itself through the insertion of fantasy sequences from Bates' imagination, or from another imagination altogether - at various times the movie (which, if nothing else, never seems to be merely coasting) seems to explicitly evoke Fellini (as in a nudity-strewn dream sequence) and Antonioni (the title also evokes his Cronaca di un amore, and Lea Massari from L'Avventura enters with Bates into a vaguely Don't Look Now-ish tumble of sexual positions) and a generalized on-the-fly kind of New Wave-ish ness. It's hard to know what the (at least to that point) usually tougher-contoured Frankenheimer wanted out of such a project, if not to disappear within it, perhaps to renew himself through an exercise in evasiveness (although with his wife Evans Evans hovering in the role of Bates' wife and providing a vague tether). Complaints about the film's inconsequentiality hardly seem fair in this context - it seems designed to perpetually recede (as love usually does, I suppose), shifting for a while into exotic dreaminess and then into sustained, piercing tragedy, before veering away again into quizzical possibilities. The film's pretty visuals and ingratiating aspects perhaps made it too easy to dismiss (certainly something did) but it's genuinely, surprisingly rewarding.

John Frankenheimer, for some reason, decided to make a French art film. It's...not good. Filming from a screenplay written by Nicholas Mosley based on his own novel, Impossible Object is supposed to be this dizzying morass of reality with fantasy with obvious inspiration from Italian filmmakers like Fellini and Pasolini, but ultimately the whole thing just isn't that interesting. The characters are too dull, their conflicts too mundane, and the distractions of fantasy too disconnected from what's going on. It was only ever actually released in France, and it's not hard to see why.

Harry (Alan Bates) is an American living in France with an American wife, Elizabeth (Evans Evans), with their children. He's a writer who keeps an office in Paris while the family lives in the countryside, and it's at a museum in Paris where Harry meets Natalie (Dominique Sanda) with whom he starts an affair. Natalie is married to Georges (Michel Auclair), a television executive, who knows she's having an affair, wishes it to end, and stops believing her every time she promises that it's over.

What is the actual story? Harry and Natalie leave their significant others when Natalie becomes pregnant, and the relationship falls apart because of a tragedy. It's simple, melodramatic stuff. What's the fantasy, then? It's Harry imagining things, mostly around women (Fellini) naked (Pasolini), especially him dressed in a white suit looking for a goddess to write about with Hippolyta (Lea Massari) being his guiding light...that he has sex with. How does this mesh with his story of leaving his wife for a younger woman he gets pregnant? I think it's more of a character thing to establish that he's a womanizer. I think.

Very seriously, the fantasy sections feel completely unrelated to the real world elements, and I wonder if it's a symptom of the edit. I know there are two edits out there with a ten minute difference between them. I know that the longer one starts with the two meeting in the museum and the shorter one starts with a view of Harry's homelife before then going to the museum meeting. I watched the shorter version because it was the only version I could find in English (the longer version was in French which I can sort of understand but not well enough), and I wonder if the shorter cut is a cut made to try and streamline what needed to be more phantasmagoric.

Because the result is just dull. I'm far from convinced that a longer, rearranged cut, though, would actually make things that much better. Harry is just kind of a dull central character. He's a writer with flights of fancy who just kind of falls into an affair with a pretty, young, French woman. And that's about all he is. She's almost nothing but a woman caught between two men. Natalie seemingly has no life outside of this affair except not wanting to attend her husband's parties with famous people. She's just not interesting.

Not even Elizabeth gets much sympathy because she's barely a character. Her one great moment is cut short in the shorter version, where she confronts Harry in the café he regularly met Natalie in, something Georges did to Natalie as well. She essentially just notes with restrained emotion the café's connection to Harry's affair and we cut away. A longer cut could fix this. A rearranged cut could make a more interesting contrast with the Georges and Natalie meeting. I still don't know what the fantasy elements have to do with anything.

Reading the very brief synopses on places like IMDB, we're supposed to question if the affair itself even happens. If it's a figment of Harry's imagination just like his fantasy with Hippolyta. But the edit I watched didn't suggest it at all. It seems pretty solidly real, and even if it was, I'm not sure what the point would be. I think the point should be the phantasmagoric trip into insanity (making me think of Clouzot's unfinished Inferno), but that's not really where the film goes. It actually goes into a nice ending with a smile.

And I don't think the film earns it. Maybe it's a salvage attempt from a studio editor to try and get some kind of happy ending, but the end result is just this mess of a mixture of dull characters, borderline incomprehensible fantasy sequences, and just straight melodrama. Do I care enough to see if the longer edit (with French dialogue which I should be able to catch maybe 50% of, combined with my familiarity with the film) fixes my issues with the shorter one? Not really. It's hard to imagine a longer, different edit really fixing the problems I have, especially when I scroll through and see that it ends the same way.

So, it's just not good. It was never released outside of France. Some studio editor seems to have tried to save it for English speaking audiences, but it went nowhere. The fantasy sequences are interesting in a sort of Pasolini way. The acting is fine, but it's not supported by the writing. Really, the only way this makes sense to me is if Frankenheimer was intending a psychedelic or phantasmagoric journey into madness, and it's obviously not what the film is. What it is ends up being...kind of just boring.