The Films of Alain Resnais

Hiroshima Mon Amour

Last Year at Marienbad

Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour

La guerre est finie

Je t'aime je t'aime (May 15/14)

Je t'aime je t'aime follows Claude Ridder's Claude Rich as he agrees to participate in a time travel experiment, with the movie detailing the inevitable problems that ensue after said experiment goes awry. It's an intriguing setup that's employed to engrossing effect in the movie's early stages, as filmmaker Alain Resnais does a nice job of initially establishing the sci-fi elements within Jacques Sternberg's expectedly talky screenplay. Je t'aime je t'aime's promising atmosphere slowly-but-surely fizzles out as time progresses, however, with Resnais' aimless sensibilities ensuring that the thin narrative runs out of steam to an increasingly noticeable degree. The central issue here is clearly Resnais' decision to employ as haphazard a structure as one could possibly envision, with the majority of the proceedings unfolding as a series of barely-connected snippets from the central character's thoroughly uninteresting life. It's obvious that Resnais is attempting to assemble a portrait of Claude's fractured relationship with his deceased wife (Olga Georges-Picot's Catrine), although Sternberg's progressively meaningless (and arbitrary) script paves the way for a second half that's often interminable in its execution (ie there's a lack of context here that grows more and more infuriating). By the time the nonsensical and aggravatingly surreal final stretch rolls around, Je t'aime je t'aime has definitively established itself as an art-house experiment that completely (and distressingly) squanders its promising setup.