It stands to reason that if Alain Resnais were to go into science fiction, he would go by time machine. For this purpose, the vehicle he has devised, with perfect deadpan sobriety, looks a good deal like Cinderella's magic pumpkin. It enables the passive guinea-pig hero to relive, in impartially selected and equally weighted moments, a long and dismal love affair which ended with an unexplained death and an attempted suicide. It also enables Resnais to demonstrate concretely that the Past is not a rock-solid territory, but rather a malleable one, subject to endless reshaping by time, memory, and imagination. Shamefully shrugged off by critics as a minor work, this profound, multileveled movie is rigorously formalized. (Each memory fragment, for example, is recorded in a single take; only on one occasion -- an incongruous glamor-girl mug shot -- is a memory broken into with an extra shot.) But beneath the austere and even-tempered surface, it achieves an overwhelming pathos -- the effect of dwelling inescapably and remorsefully in the past; the incurable misery of the lovers ("I used to wake up nights...I hated it...stayed awake so as not to wake up"); and the understated, downcast performance of Claude Rich as the apathetic time traveller. With Olga-Georges Picot; written by Jacques Sternberg. (1968) — Duncan Shepherd
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