Complex, abstract and utterly existential, Resnais’ first feature in colour deals with the past, present and future as battlegrounds of half-truths, and edited in a fragmented ‘shards-like’ style, as a woman’s ex-lover pays her a visit.
Extramarital affairs don’t get any more enigmatic and impenetrable than Resnais’ hypnotic Venice Golden Lion-winning anti-romance that boldly discards structure and narrative, leaving only unreliable memories and narrators.
My favourite feature debut from the French New Wave—an extraordinary meditation on trauma, memory and love as Resnais merges the historical, geographical and the personal in an intelligent and sensuous way.
An under-appreciated oddball of a film by Alain Resnais that dabbles with US-French cultural idiosyncrasies as well as the tension between popular culture and intellectual scholarship.
Resnais blurs the lines between theatre and cinema in this mature treatise on the ‘love triangle’, marked by a trio of outstanding performances.
Resnais’ tonally-jarring ‘musical-drama’ that intercuts across three timelines feels too artificially-constructed and incoherent to make any meaningful sense.
An unexpected critical success, Resnais’ sly, mosaic-like film about behavioural psychology as explored through the personal stories of a trio of interconnecting characters is a masterclass in associative editing, and one of his finest pictures.
Eternality Tan 