It would be easy enough, if insufficient, to say what's unusual about Alain Resnais's fourteenth feature. Just this: that the characters, in openly acknowledged hommage to British screenwriter Dennis Potter (Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective, most pertinently), will periodically lip-sync to fragments of French pop songs from a wide range of vintages: Josephine Baker, Maurice Chevalier, Gilbert Bécaud, Johnny Hallyday, et al. The effect of the lip-sync device, as you can readily imagine, is one of high incongruity and high hilarity (never more so than during André Dussollier's daydream of himself on horseback in guardsman's regalia). No doubt the song quotations also say something serious about the shaping of modern consciousness by popular culture. But either way, it seems a little surprising that Resnais, so averse to repetition, so adventurous in matters of form, would elect to borrow and adapt an idea that belongs so patently -- so patentedly -- to somebody else. Is he getting a little tired in his seventies? Is he relaxing a little? Resnais's use of mere fragments of songs and his avoidance of choreographed production numbers make the idea arguably into something of his own, and at the same time prevent any individual gag from growing old before our eyes (a problem with Potter). And it is worth recalling that he, with no need to pay homage to anybody, made an earlier sortie into musical territory in Life Is a Bed of Roses, where the actors -- some of the same actors as a matter of fact -- also would lip-sync the lyrics. On that outing, Resnais had much more to say about the genre -- about the human potentialities unleashed therein and about the occult powers of song -- than he has to say here. Same Old Song, though it contains more music, is less of a musical. Indeed, the oddest thing about the lip-sync device is that it could easily have been eliminated altogether if we were willing to sacrifice the laughs that it brings. (But why would we want to do that?) The bubbling-up songs are only one element -- albeit a disproportionately weighted element -- in the total portrait of life below the surface, life down in the mind. And the movie, even were the songs deleted, is riddled with Resnais's long-established interests in façades and what lies behind them, in the unseen and the concealed, in the power and reality of the intangible. Carried off with supreme suavity and serenity, it is a perceptive, witty, civilized, cerebral, and stubbornly "unsexy" comedy on some of the fundamentals of human existence: love, health, employment, habitation. It is not a movie about the songs that get embedded in people's minds throughout the course of life. It is a movie about people, about minds, about life, about everything. The songs that get embedded are only one thing. And there are plenty of laughs outside the songs. Written by (also starring) Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri; with Sabine Azéma, Pierre Arditi, Lambert Wilson. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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