Resnais: Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) + Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Hiroshima, Mon Amour (***1/2 out of ****)
I really enjoyed Alain Resnais's "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and intellectually I understand it's a great, important, and influential movie. Without it there probably wouldn't be "Memento" or "Lost in Translation" or many of the films of David Lynch. Even my short film screenplay "Days Since She Called Me" is essentially a simplified version of "Hiroshima," of people wandering late at night, and I wrote that before I even saw Resnais's film.
"Hiroshima" is precisely the kind of film that I should love, in which two people, because they've never met and are unlikely to see each other again, become very intimate very fast (echoes of my short film "The Scam/Deceit") and share secrets from their past that continue to haunt them, using rapidly cut and non-chronological flashbacks. The characters become obsessed with forgetting, sometimes wanting to forget in order to move on, sometimes never forgetting in order to remain faithful, either to a dead lover or a citywide cataclysm. She's French, he's Japanese, and their affair is always shadowed by being in Hiroshima 15 years after the bomb dropped. The enormity of the bomb is incomprehensible, and anyone who wasn't there becomes a tourist to the city's suffering. But the A-bomb is similar enough to her personal, microcosmic tragedy that we understand that the only way to comprehend tragedy so enormous is to start small.
So I should love this movie, but I think because the subject matter is so close to my heart, and so personal, that I need to feel closer to the characters, and more like them, to produce a personal connection to the film. There's nothing academic I can hold against "Hiroshima" and it's not because the characters live long ago and far away, either. The lovers in "Hiroshima" are simply a little too "not like me" for me to love the movie, and if the subject matter weren't so near and dear, that wouldn't make a difference.
Maybe if I were younger and may brain were more flexible. Maybe if I see it again. Maybe if I saw it on the bigscreen instead of at home. Also, Resnais's 4:3 camerawork, while in no way stodgy, is a little too formal in places, although he works in some great tracking shots.
Also, the old lady in the train station is awesome.
Last Year at Marienbad (**** out of ****)
Now I love the hell out of Resnais's next film, 1961's "Last Year at Marienbad," which is probably the arty-est arthouse film ever. We saw it on the bigscreen at the art museum and it's a glorious 2.35:1 maze of untrustworthy flashbacks, untrustworthy narration, daydreams, fantasies, misremembered moments, and memories re-written, told in flowing, lyrical tracking shots, up and down the confines and corridors of a palatial European resort house, where rich people come to while away the summer. One of Resnais's most stunning techniques is to quickly intercut two versions of the same memory, in the same place, but one is during the day, and the other is at night; the jump from dark to bright is so shocking it's almost nauseating. Like "Russian Ark," I didn't analyze it or try to get intellectually into "Marienbad." I just let wash over me, like a reverse action movie, in which instead of getting my heart pumping, it slowed me down and lulled me into a black-and-white hypnosis of foreign whispers and gliding imagery.
"Marienbad" is a puzzle film beloved by Kubrick, and certainly as big an inspiration to his "The Shining" as Stephen King's novel. Like, say, "Russian Ark" again, there's no single explanation that fits what's happening. There might not have even been a last year at Marienbad. Anyway, it's about this guy who is pursuing a married woman whom he may have met the year before, but she says otherwise, and we're treated to an enormous, dreamlike vision of joyless plutocrats who seem trapped in their summer home for an hypnotic eternity. Because the protagonist is a pompous artsy-fartsy douchebag, continually revising what happened before and how he wants to exert control now, I felt an immediate connection to him, and spent most of the movie grinning like an idiot
(As always, I function in extremes: in addition to the novel-style time-shifting nature of so many films of the European New wave, in which past and present are indistinguishable, I also appreciate how Michael Mann continues to fetishize ferociously present-tense filmmaking, peaking with "Miami Vice" and "Public Enemies," in which who the characters are before they walk on screen is of no importance.)
ntents here.
I really enjoyed Alain Resnais's "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and intellectually I understand it's a great, important, and influential movie. Without it there probably wouldn't be "Memento" or "Lost in Translation" or many of the films of David Lynch. Even my short film screenplay "Days Since She Called Me" is essentially a simplified version of "Hiroshima," of people wandering late at night, and I wrote that before I even saw Resnais's film.
"Hiroshima" is precisely the kind of film that I should love, in which two people, because they've never met and are unlikely to see each other again, become very intimate very fast (echoes of my short film "The Scam/Deceit") and share secrets from their past that continue to haunt them, using rapidly cut and non-chronological flashbacks. The characters become obsessed with forgetting, sometimes wanting to forget in order to move on, sometimes never forgetting in order to remain faithful, either to a dead lover or a citywide cataclysm. She's French, he's Japanese, and their affair is always shadowed by being in Hiroshima 15 years after the bomb dropped. The enormity of the bomb is incomprehensible, and anyone who wasn't there becomes a tourist to the city's suffering. But the A-bomb is similar enough to her personal, microcosmic tragedy that we understand that the only way to comprehend tragedy so enormous is to start small.
So I should love this movie, but I think because the subject matter is so close to my heart, and so personal, that I need to feel closer to the characters, and more like them, to produce a personal connection to the film. There's nothing academic I can hold against "Hiroshima" and it's not because the characters live long ago and far away, either. The lovers in "Hiroshima" are simply a little too "not like me" for me to love the movie, and if the subject matter weren't so near and dear, that wouldn't make a difference.
Maybe if I were younger and may brain were more flexible. Maybe if I see it again. Maybe if I saw it on the bigscreen instead of at home. Also, Resnais's 4:3 camerawork, while in no way stodgy, is a little too formal in places, although he works in some great tracking shots.
Also, the old lady in the train station is awesome.
Last Year at Marienbad (**** out of ****)
Now I love the hell out of Resnais's next film, 1961's "Last Year at Marienbad," which is probably the arty-est arthouse film ever. We saw it on the bigscreen at the art museum and it's a glorious 2.35:1 maze of untrustworthy flashbacks, untrustworthy narration, daydreams, fantasies, misremembered moments, and memories re-written, told in flowing, lyrical tracking shots, up and down the confines and corridors of a palatial European resort house, where rich people come to while away the summer. One of Resnais's most stunning techniques is to quickly intercut two versions of the same memory, in the same place, but one is during the day, and the other is at night; the jump from dark to bright is so shocking it's almost nauseating. Like "Russian Ark," I didn't analyze it or try to get intellectually into "Marienbad." I just let wash over me, like a reverse action movie, in which instead of getting my heart pumping, it slowed me down and lulled me into a black-and-white hypnosis of foreign whispers and gliding imagery.
"Marienbad" is a puzzle film beloved by Kubrick, and certainly as big an inspiration to his "The Shining" as Stephen King's novel. Like, say, "Russian Ark" again, there's no single explanation that fits what's happening. There might not have even been a last year at Marienbad. Anyway, it's about this guy who is pursuing a married woman whom he may have met the year before, but she says otherwise, and we're treated to an enormous, dreamlike vision of joyless plutocrats who seem trapped in their summer home for an hypnotic eternity. Because the protagonist is a pompous artsy-fartsy douchebag, continually revising what happened before and how he wants to exert control now, I felt an immediate connection to him, and spent most of the movie grinning like an idiot
(As always, I function in extremes: in addition to the novel-style time-shifting nature of so many films of the European New wave, in which past and present are indistinguishable, I also appreciate how Michael Mann continues to fetishize ferociously present-tense filmmaking, peaking with "Miami Vice" and "Public Enemies," in which who the characters are before they walk on screen is of no importance.)
ntents here.