Gradiva (2006)

Gradiva, released in 2006, was Alain Robbe-Grillet’s final feature film.

In all his films Robbe-Grillet always made sure the audience knew from the start that they were not going to get anything resembling a realist film from him. He was going to be playing games with narrative. There were going to be multiple layers of reality and unreality. Maybe none of it is real. In fact of course none of it is real because this is a movie. These people are actors. It’s a made-up story.

The setting is Morocco, in the present day. John Locke (James Wilby) is a professor researching a book on the painter Delacroix. He has heard of some hitherto unknown sketchbooks by the artist. It’s an exciting discovery. If they’re authentic. He isn’t sure if they’re authentic or not.

They contain sketches done by the artist during his time in Mogador. But Delacroix is not known to have ever visited Mogador. The sketches are of a woman with whom he had a affair. The woman was later executed. If she ever existed.

We are introduced to a beautiful blonde woman (played by Arielle Dombasle). She is writing a story. For all we know she might be writing the screenplay for Alain Robbe-Grillet’s movie Gradiva. Later she tells another woman that she is writing her memoirs but she does not believe memoirs should be about the past. They should be about the future.

Locke sees this beautiful blonde woman and pursues her through the streets of Marrakech. He loses her but ends up in Anatoli’s establishment. Anatoli is an art dealer. Or he might be a white slaver. Or he might be a doctor. His establishment might be a brothel or it might be a theatre.

There are young women being whipped. They might be slaves. They might be actresses pretending to be slaves, or slaves pretending to be actresses.

Locke lives with Belkis, a cute Arab girl. She might be his slave or his mistress. Either way she is clearly in love with him. He is very fond of her but whether he is in love with her or not is uncertain.

The beautiful blonde woman tells Locke that she is an actress but while she does some film and theatre work she is mostly a dream actress. She earns her living acting in other people’s dreams. Her name is Leila, or perhaps Gradiva. She may be the ghost of Delacroix’s long-dead mistress.

Leila may at this moment be acting in one of Locke’s dreams.

There have been a number of murders. Locke has seen some of the corpses of the dead girls although they might be actresses.

Locke certainly has dreams. Some may be drug-induced. It’s also possible that the dreams have been induced by Delacroix’s sketches. Art is a powerful drug.

Of course, since this is a Robbe-Grillet film, there is plenty of sado-masochistic eroticism but since this is a Robbe-Grillet film we have serious doubts as to whether any of the whippings are real. The young women might be actresses. This could be a movie in which actresses are playing the roles of actresses.

Robbe-Grillet felt that his movies used the erotic as raw material but were not erotic films as such because there was always a critical distance. The erotic material does not seem real and there is no attempt to persuade us that any of the erotic encounters are real. There is an air of artificiality which is the exact opposite of the effect at which an erotic movie would be aiming.

For me the key to Robbe-Grillet’s work, and the reason I enjoy his work so much, is his playfulness. He enjoyed making movies. He wanted people to enjoy watching them. He wanted his viewers to enjoy the game.

By 2006 Robbe-Grillet was totally out of touch with contemporary tastes in cinema. That’s why this movie is vastly superior to almost all 21st century movies. What’s even better is that his whole aesthetic was out of fashion. Robbe-Grillet assumes that his audience will have no difficulty in coping with movies that operate on multiple levels and in which reality and dream and fantasy and illusion and art form an intoxicating cocktail. He also assumes that there is no need to give the viewer any clues as to where reality ends and dream takes over. He sees no need to spoon-feed the audience.

And of course it is always a mistake in a film such as this to offer the audience such clues. The whole point is that life and art and dream defy explanation. We’re not supposed to expect any clear-cut explanations. That would spoil everything.

The location shooting in Morocco is a plus. Any Robbe-Grillet movie is going to be a visual treat and this is no exception.

Gradiva is a mesmerising film. It’s very arty but it’s also witty and it’s fun. Art films are allowed to be enjoyable. Highly recommended.

The Mondo Macabro DVD offers a lovely transfer and includes an excellent in-depth interview with Robbe-Grillet.

I’ve reviewed almost all of his movies. La Belle Captive remains my favourite but I have a very definite soft spot for L’immortelle and Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974) is dazzling. I also highly recommend his novel La Maison de rendez-vous (available in an English translation).

N. Took the Dice (1971)

When Alain Robbe-Grillet made Eden and After in 1970 he was actually shooting two movies simultaneously. One, Eden and After, was intended for theatrical release. The second, N. Took the Dice (N. a pris les dés…), was to be a TV-movie for French television. Both movies were made with the exact same crew and the exact same cast. Most of the footage used in both films is identical. What Robbe-Grillet then did was to take the footage he’d shot and edit it into two entirely different movies. 

And they really are entirely different movies, even if they do incorporate the same repertoire of themes and images.

The cast members are the same and they wear the same costumes and often they’re performing in the exact same scenes but they’re not necessarily playing the same characters. And often the dialogue has been changed.

We see many of the same scenes in both movies but they have entirely different meanings. There’s a scene in which a character is being chased around a cafe. In one version that character is in real danger, in the other the two people are clearly engaged in good-natured horseplay.

The footage has been radically re-edited. The entire sequence of shots and events has been shuffled around. Scenes that appear at the end of Eden and After appear at the beginning of N. Took the Dice. Which totally changes the meaning and the significance of those scenes. The meaning of a shot comes from the context. Change the context and you change the meaning.

In both movies a young woman played by Catherine Jourdan owns a very valuable painting. She looks the same but she may not be the same woman in both movies. In one version the painting is by a famous artist, in the other it was done by one of her fellow students.

At one point there’s the exact same shot in both movies but in one version a man is killed, in the other he’s totally uninjured.

In both versions the woman played by Catherine Jourdan is kidnapped in Tunisia, by the same actors wearing the same costumes in the same shots, but the kidnappers are different people in the two versions.

There’s no real plot in Eden and After, just a succession of themes and images with only tenuous connections. N. Took the Dice has even less of a plot.

In N. Took the Dice the technique used by Robbe-Grillet is made more overt. We get a man named N. throwing dice, with the sequence of the scenes clearly determined by the random fall of the dice.

In both movies we’re left to wonder how much is dream, how much is drug-induced hallucination, how much is a movie within a movie. N. Took the Dice adds the suggestion that some of the events are in fact part of a television game show.

Robbe-Grillet was a very playful director and that comes cross in both these movies. There’s plenty of artiness and complexity but there’s fun as well.

Being a TV-movie N. Took the Dice naturally has most of the nudity removed although some of the hints of sadomasochism remain. This movie is so far removed from reality that it’s difficult to see how anyone could take offence.

N. Took the Dice is typical Robbe-Grillet which means it’s highly recommended.

The BFI have released this film on DVD and Blu-Ray. Eden and After and N. Took the Dice are both on the same disc. The transfer is extremely good. I have also reviewed Eden and After.

Eden and After (1970)

Eden and After, released in 1970, is probably Alain Robbe-Grillet’s weirdest most perplexing most experimental and most avant-garde movie. Surprisingly it actually made money. The 70s were different.

Eden and After was intended for theatrical release and was made in tandem with N. Took the Dice which was intended for French television. It’s sometimes assumed that the latter was simply Eden and After toned down for TV but it’s actually not the same film at all even though it shares huge amounts of footage.

There’s no point in talking about the script. The movie didn’t have one. Robbe-Grillet had charts of themes, ideas and images the movie would touch on and basically improvised from there. It’s like a series of episodes which may be connected in some way but the connections are enigmatic. Whether any of these episodes are real is up to the viewer to decide. Each of the five sections of the film would deal with twelve different thematic ideas. Don’t jump to the conclusion that the whole thing is a dream. That would be a wildly simplistic reading of a fiendishly complex film.

The movie starts with a rape, followed by a game of Russian roulette which ends in tragedy. This might sound like uncomfortable viewing but it’s not because it’s just a game and that’s obvious right from the start. There will be lots more games.

A group of bored university students hang out at the Eden cafe (which looks like a Mondrian painting turned into a building). They play elaborate games. The games become more elaborate. Perhaps the games become real, or perhaps they don’t.

The first section of the movie deals with these games.

Then we get a major change in the second section with the arrival of The Stranger (we will later find out that his name might be Duchemin or he might be the Dutchman). He’s an older man and the students seem inclined to follow his lead.

He gives Violette (Catherine Jourdan) a drug which he claims that he obtained in Africa. He calls it the powder of fear. It certainly induces fear in Violette. The Stranger then gives her the antidote. Since the antidote is pure water we might feel inclined to suspect that the powder of fear contained no drug at all - that Violette was merely responding to a kind of hypnotic suggestion.

Violette (Catherine Jourdan) owns a small but very valuable painting. It’s an abstract painting but it’s slightly reminiscent of houses in Tunisia. The action will later move to Tunisia, possibly. Her boyfriend suggest that they sell the painting to finance a trip to Tunisia by the whole group.

The third section moves the action to a huge factory. Violette seems to be pursued by some of the male students we saw earlier but we can’t be certain the actors are still playing the same characters.

The fourth section takes is set in Tunisia. Or maybe we’re not in Tunisia, maybe we’re in a movie about Tunisia that Violette was watching. We see the same actors and actresses we saw earlier but playing quite different roles. Everyone in this movie has a double.

In the fifth section we’re still in Tunisia where Violette is held prisoner. This section gives us an actual narrative or perhaps it tempts us into believing it’s an actual narrative. Violette is to be forced by her kidnappers to reveal the location of that painting. This finally leads us to an enigmatic ending which might explain everything or nothing.

An interesting feature of this movie is that there’s nothing green in it because Robbe-Grillet detested the colour green. He loved Tunisia because at the right time of year everything green was dead.

Catherine Jourdan was not supposed to be the star but Robbe-Grillet was so impressed by her that he kept giving her more screen time until she became in fact the star.

Surrealism is very difficult to pull off successfully. That’s the case in any medium but it’s especially true in film. If it’s done badly it seems merely silly, being bizarre for the sake of being bizarre. To be successful the viewer has to have a feeling that what seems meaningless actually does have a meaning, if only that meaning could be uncovered. It has to have a genuinely unsettling quality, as if the rules have been changed but there are still rules. It’s just that those rules are mysterious and unfathomable. Maybe the rules are unknown even to the creator of the work.

This movie also has a certain trippy quality, but it’s a million miles away from the trippiness of American movies of its era. There’s no influence of hippie culture. There’s no trace of psychedelia. The trippiness doesn’t come from crude camera tricks and it doesn’t feel like drug-induced trippiness. This is more cerebral, more like a genuine exploration of the elusiveness of reality than just an acid trip. There are drugs in the movie but to see the story as a drug-induced delusion would be as misleading as seeing it as a dream. The border between illusion and reality can be fuzzy, as can the border between reality and art. In this movie we’re not seeing a simulacrum of reality, we are inhabiting a work of art.

This is not quite surrealism but it’s certainly influenced by surrealism as well as being influenced by various modernist movements in art and literature.

One thing that’s interesting about this movie is that it appears to include a rape, several murders and several scenes of torture but in fact there’s no violence at all. All these acts of violence are so ostentatiously stylised and artificial that we are not for one second expected to see them as real. There’s one particularly brilliant scene in which a woman is tortured, but actually she is not being tortured at all. She is not harmed even slightly. The torture takes place in her own mind through the power of suggestion.

This is a very non-Hollywood movie that makes no concessions to realism. Modern viewers will likely take offence at all sorts of things here but none of these things actually happens.

Eden and After is reminiscent of Just Jaeckin’s Gwendoline (1984) in the sense that it employs sadomasochistic and fetishistic imagery in an obviously playful way. There are hints of sadomasochistic in Robbe-Grillet’s earliest films but it’s something that plays an increasing role in his later movies.

A particular highlight is a scene which brings Marcel Duchamps’ famous modernist painting Nude Descending a Staircase No 2 to life. It’s very cleverly done.

Eden and After is fascinating and hypnotic and it’s highly recommended.

The BFI have released this film on DVD and Blu-Ray. The disc includes a helpful audio commentary by Tim Lucas and also includes N. Took the Dice.

If you’re new to Robbe-Grillet’s movies I’m not sure that I’d start with this one. L’Immortelle, Trans-Europ Express, Successive Slidings of Pleasure, La Belle Captive and Playing with Fire are more accessible and more fun. They’re not quite as aggressively experimental and avant-garde.

I will also review N. Took the Dice.

La Maison de rendez-vous (novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet)

La Maison de rendez-vous is a 1965 novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Robbe-Grillet received great acclaim in his native France as a novelist, belonging to the so-called New Novel (Nouveau Roman) school. This was one of the many variants of modernism with perhaps some touches of what would later become known as postmodernism. These writers were not notably concerned with traditional approaches to narrative and characterisation.

Robbe-Grillet also achieve both fame and notoriety as a filmmaker. His movies play around with conventional narrative and include some very marked surrealist influences. He is best-known in the English-speaking as the screenwriter of the superb and influential 1961 movie Last Year at Marienbad (which was directed by Alain Resnais but feels much more like an Alain Robbe-Grillet movie).

My full review of La Maison de rendez-vous can be found here at Vintage Pop Fictions.

Playing with Fire (1975)

Playing with Fire is a 1975 movie written and directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Robbe-Grillet was one of the foremost exponents of cinematic surrealism and may in fact have been the greatest of all surrealist film-makers. As with most film-makers who explored such territories you can argue about whether he really qualifies as a surrealist. Robbe-Grillet was a novelist as well as a film-maker and certainly belonged to both the literary and cinematic avant-garde. Robbe-Grillet made art films but he was also a very playful film-maker. His movies are puzzling and cerebral but they’re also a lot of fun.

Playing with Fire was inspired to a considerable extent by the Patty Hearst saga.

Playing with Fire begins with the kidnapping of a young woman, but was she really kidnapped? Maybe the kidnapping hasn’t occurred but will occur. We see middle-aged banker Georges de Saxe (Philippe Noiret) sitting at his desk writing. He may be writing a story or an account of real events. He may even be writing the script for the movie we’re watching.

The kidnap victim is, or possibly will be, his daughter Carolina (Anicée Alvina). We notice something slightly odd about this father and daughter. They seem to be intimate in a way that is a little disturbing. Carolina seems totally unconcerned about having her leg fondled by her father.

Carolina has not been kidnapped but she did write the note saying that she needed to be rescued. Her explanation for the note is very odd.

Georges de Saxe hires a private detective, Franz (Jean-Louis Trintignant), to protect his daughter. Trintignant plays two roles in the movie, or perhaps they’re all the same rôle.

The banker is advised to send his daughter into hiding in a safe place. It is suggested that an insane asylum or a brothel would be suitable hiding places.

Carolina ends up in a very large old clinic where everybody at first seems totally immobile. She is not sure if she is a prisoner. The clinic seems to be a brothel rather than a clinic. There are lots of women there. It’s uncertain if they’re there voluntarily or not. Some of these women seem to merge into each other. In other cases we have several male characters played by the same actor. Are we in a dream? If so, whose dream?

Robbe-Grillet’s films still have the ability to upset and bewilder both viewers and critics. When faced with a movie without a straightforward linear narrative there’s a temptation to approach it as a puzzle to be solved. Like a jigsaw puzzle - at first you just have a jumble but if you’re clever and patient you put the pieces together to form a straightforward picture. That doesn’t work with Robbe-Grillet’s movies. No matter how hard you try you’re not going to be able to reconstruct his movies into straightforward linear narratives. You’re never going to be able to give a definite answer to the question - What Really Happened. That exasperates viewers who feel that they should be able to answer that question.

Critics still get upset and uncomfortable with the eroticism of Robbe-Grillet’s films, particularly the hints of sadomasochism. That’s becoming more of a problem in today’s increasingly puritanical world and even Robbe-Grillet’s admirers sometimes feel the need to offer justifications for the eroticism.

The eroticism is part and parcel of his work. And it’s complex. He uses it for varying purposes. Robbe-Grillet wanted to create strange magical images and at times he’d include nude women in shots because they made the images more strange and magical. In Playing with Fire nude women are potent symbols, but not necessarily erotic symbols.

Robbe-Grillet was immensely influenced by Jules Michelet’s 1862 book on witchcraft, La Sorcière. There are subtle hints of vampirism, black magic and witchcraft in many of Robbe-Grillet’s movies and these elements certainly intersect with the eroticism, and the female nudity creates a feel of some weird kind of occult ceremonies. But again the more you try to analyse his work the more you get led astray by a search for meanings. It’s better just to immerse yourself in a Robbe-Grillet movie rather than try to analyse it logically.

Robbe-Grillet had zero interest in conventional cinematic realism and he was not interested in getting realistic performances from actors. The performances are all slightly distanced and artificial which seems to be what Robbe-Grillet wanted (it’s something that you notice in all his movies). There are also moments when the characters are aware of being characters in a film, such as the moment when Trintignant tells us he doesn’t understand the script.

It’s also worth mentioning that Robbe-Grillet uses three key pieces of music as what he called “generators” in this movie. The music is as important as the visuals.

Sylvia Kristel has a small rôle. By the time Playing with Fire was released Kristel had become a sensation in Emmanuelle so she was hurriedly given equal top billing, which made sense since she was now Playing with Fire’s biggest drawcard.

Robbe-Grillet may have been playing games with his audience but he wanted the audience to have fun playing those games. His movies are wild and exhilarating and exuberant. Playing with Fire is very highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed several of his other movies - L’immortelle (1963), Trans-Europ-Express (1966), Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974) and La Belle Captive (1983). All are must-see movies.

Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974)

Successive Slidings of Pleasure (Glissements progressifs du plaisir) is a 1974 movie written and directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet. It’s an art film, with a capital A. It’s also a thriller, an exploitation movie, an erotic movie and a surrealist movie.

This film was made on a ridiculously low budget (500,000 francs), which suited Robbe-Grillet since what he wanted most of all was artistic freedom. He was happy to keep within such a minuscule budget if he could make the film he wanted to make without interference. Which is appropriate since the movie deals (among other things) with themes of freedom from stifling social controls.

The biggest star in the movie is Jean-Louis Trintignant (who starred in Robbe-Grillet’s wonderful Trans-Europ Express). Officially they couldn’t afford him, but he was a friend of Robbe-Grillet and was apparently happy to do the movie for nothing.

The movie starts with the arrival of a police inspector at a murder scene. An unnamed girl (played by Anicée Alvina) may have murdered her room-mate Nora (Olga Georges-Picot). The girl claims that a man has been following her and that he broke in and killed Nora. Nora is nude and tied to the bed and she and the girl had been, apparently, involved in some sort of sexual game involving art and bondage (this is an Alain Robbe-Grillet film).

The girl’s story is unlikely and it’s full of holes and contradictions but it may be true. It’s also possible that she’s crazy and has no idea if she murdered Nora or not. Everything we see through the girl’s eyes could be true or false or it could be misrememberings or misinterpretations.

We also can’t be sure that the theories that occur to the police inspector or to the examining magistrate (Michel Lonsdale) have any basis in reality. We can’t be sure if anything has any basis in reality (Alain Robbe-Grillet was after all the guy who wrote Last Year at Marienbad).

The girl is confined in a prison run by nuns (and one scene was according to Tim Lucas shot in the very cell in which the Marquis de Sade had been confined). There probably weren’t any prisons run by nuns in France in 1974. But this is a surrealist film so the prison is run by nuns.

The narrative jumps about all over the place. There is a narrative but it’s disconnected and fragmented and it certainly isn’t linear in time. To complicate things, we have no idea what we can believe and what we can’t believe. Many of the events of the movie may be imaginary but we can’t be sure whose imagination they’re taking place in. The girl thinks she can cause people’s deaths with her thoughts and she thinks that she had been responsible for the death of a teacher at her school. We see the teacher’s death in a flashback but we have to remember that this is a memory that may have become totally distorted in her mind.

Anicée Alvina is extraordinary and mesmerising.

There are numerous shots that look liker surrealist paintings (especially by Magritte - Robbe-Grillet later made the superb La Belle Captive inspired by Magritte’s paintings). There are mannequins, and there are mannequins that may be real and women who may be mannequins. In most scenes Nora, even when alive, is as still as a mannequin.

While the film school crowd would no doubt prefer to compare Robbe-Grillet to Luis Buñuel, Buñuel being the sort of surrealist that they dote on. I personally think Robbe-Grillet has more in common with Jean Rollin.

This is a movie that was bitterly attacked by feminists at the time, much to the amusement of Robbe-Grillet’s wife Catherine who points out in her introduction that the feminists missed the point of the movie entirely.

Robbe-Grillet ended up in a strange position. He first made a name for himself as an avant-garde novelist in the 1950s. His screenplay for Last Year at Marienbad and his first directorial efforts, L’Immortelle and Trans-Europ Express, established him as a maker of art films. From 1970 onwards though the nudity, the sexual subject matter and the sadomasochistic undercurrents in his films made him not quite respectable among the usual audience for art films (and not quite resectable among critics). So he ended up caught somewhere between the worlds of art films and exploitation movies. Like the other great French surrealist movie-maker of that era, Jean Rollin, he was attacked by critics who simply couldn’t comprehend what he was trying to do.

While Robbe-Grillet’s movies are very much art movies you shouldn’t make the mistake of taking them too seriously. Robbe-Grillet thought that art could be fun. He thought it was OK to enjoy art. The secret to appreciating his movies is just to settle back and enjoy the ride. And don’t worry about trying to make sense of everything. His movies are not realist films. They’re surrealism. Things are not necessarily supposed to make sense in a conventional manner. And some things are intentionally left ambiguous and mystifying.

This movie has been released by The British Film Institute as part of a boxed set (available on both DVD and Blu-Ray) called Alain Robbe-Grillet: Six Films 1963-1974. The anamorphic transfer is very good. The extras include an illuminating audio commentary by Tim Lucas, an introduction by Robbe-Grillet’s wife Catherine and portions of an interview with the director.

Successive Slidings of Pleasure is at times bizarre, often playful and always puzzling but if you just let the movie take you where it wants to take you you’ll have quite a ride. Very highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Last Year at Marienbad, L’immortelle, La belle captive (which in my view is his masterpiece) and Trans-Europ-Express - all of which I highly recommend.

La Belle Captive (1983), Blu-Ray review

Alain Robbe-Grillet’s 1983 film La Belle Captive (The Beautiful Prisoner) was inspired by the works of the great surrealist painter René Magritte, and particularly by his famous 1931 painting La Belle Captive. From the very first moments of the film we know we’re in surrealist territory. There’s a shot of a girl riding a motorcycle which is very deliberately staged to make it clear that we’re seeing something shot on a sound stage. Later on we will see the hero driving his sports car and again it’s made ostentatiously obvious that it was filmed on a sound stage. It makes sense to ensure that the viewer is very much aware of watching a movie since Magritte’s painting is a painting of a painting.

Everything about the movie is consciously artificial. Which leads us to wonder if any of it is real, or perhaps we’re expected to wonder what reality even means.

Walter Raim (Daniel Mesguich) works for something called the Organisation but we don’t know what this outfit does. We do know that it’s something secret, or at least secretive. Walter receives an order from his boss Sara Zeitgeist (love the name) to deliver a letter to a French senator, Henri de Corinthe. On the way he finds a young woman lying on the road. There’s some blood on her but she appears to be mostly in shock rather than injured. The odd thing is that she is handcuffed.

He'd met the girl earlier at a night club but she’d told him she didn’t know what her name was (he will later, much later, find out the her name is Marie-Ange).

Walter arrives at a mansion, the Villa Seconde, hoping to find a telephone to call a doctor. There’s a kind of gathering in progress. There are lots of men and they are clearly rich powerful men. They ignore Walter’s pleas and instead start speculating on the price he is going to ask for the girl. Clearly they would all like to buy her and clearly money is no object.

It’s not that they’re overtly excited. They’re too rich, too powerful, too decadent, to betray excitement. I’m assuming that Stanley Kubrick must have seen this film and must have been influenced by this scene to some extent (even possibly to a very large extent) when he made Eyes Wide Shut sixteen years later. La Belle Captive certainly anticipates the decadent eroticism of Kubrick’s film.

Of course you’d expect, if you turned up at someone’s house with a very pretty handcuffed girl, that the immediate response would be to enquire as to why she’s restrained in the matter and to take steps to release her from her bondage. But these guys just think it was clever of Walter to bring her to them handcuffed. Actually they’re not handcuffs - her wrists are bounds with a golden chain. So obviously it could not have been the police who bound her.

The girl behaves oddly as well, meekly bending her head to drink from a glass of something that is offered to her.

Walter is not sure what happens later that night, or why he has a wound on his throat. He thinks he may have slept with the girl.

When he tries to deliver the letter to de Corinthe things get stranger. There are things he needs to find out, so he finds himself acting as a private eye in an old Hollywood movie (complete with trench-coat and fedora). Inspector Francis offers no help but does give him a postcard - off Magritte’s paining La Belle Captive. He returns to the Villa Seconde to find that it’s nothing but a ruin. He tries to talk to the neighbours but all he finds next door is a mad girl. He does find out some things at the night club but those things make everything much more puzzling and bizarre.

He finds one of the girl’s shoes. Later he finds the other shoe. And later still he finds the third shoe of the pair.

If you’ve seen any of Robbe-Grillet’s other films you won’t be surprised by the surrealism and deliberate artificiality or by the sense that what we’re seeing may not be what it appears to be, and may not be real, or may be real but not in the way we usually think of reality. La Belle Captive has obvious affinities to his much earlier Trans-Europ-Express which was a blending of art-house and pulp crime thriller/spy thriller elements. In this film there’s also a hint of the classic private eye thriller. Walter might be playing the rôle of Philip Marlowe, or perhaps Lemmy Caution.

Daniel Mesguich is excellent, playing Walter as a man who is both over-confident and hopelessly confused. Gabrielle Lazure brings the right mix of disturbing sexuality and mystery to the rôle of Marie-Ange. Cyrielle Clair is suitably enigmatic as Sara Zeitgeist. Is she a conspirator, an innocent bystander or a victim? Sara does like her motorcycles. She keeps two of them in her bedroom.

If you’re familiar with Robbe-Grillet’s work you also won’t be surprised by the kinky eroticism. If there are no hints of sado-masochism it just isn’t a proper Robbe-Grillet film.

The Villa Seconde set is all creepy decadence. There are a lot of beach scenes, appropriate given the subject matter of Magritte’s painting but fans of French surrealist cinema will also be reminded of the many beach scenes in Jean Rollin’s films.

This movie does have some very Rollin-esque touches. Rollin and Robbe-Grillet were, in my view, the two masters of French cinematic surrealism - a distinctively subtle sort of erotically charged surrealism.

There are also touches of sly humour. Robbe-Grillet may be arty but he has a sense of fun which is easily overlooked.

I first saw this film twelve years ago, but that was the old and not very satisfactory non-anamorphic Koch Lorber DVD release. Seeing it again but in the Olive Films Blu-Ray release makes a huge difference. The Olive Films release is anamorphic and is superior in every way. Sadly there are no extras aside from a trailer. This is a movie that would have benefited enormously from an audio commentary. Anyone new to Robbe-Grillet’s work or unfamiliar with surrealism might be a little bewildered by it all. Robbe-Grillet has that effect on some people. Once you’ve seen a few of his movies they start to make a lot more sense.

You don’t have to make sense of La Belle Captive to enjoy it but if you like films that do make sense there is a plausible plot resolution at the end. There is an important clue midway through as to what’s really going on, or at least to the most likely explanation.

A fascinating visually arresting movie. Very highly recommended.

Trans-Europ-Express (1966)

Trans-Europ-Express was Alain Robbe-Grillet’s second feature film as director, following L’Immortelle, although he was already famous in the film world as the screenwriter of Last Year at Marienbad. Trans-Europ-Express was released in 1966 and since it’s a Robbe-Grillet film you can be assured that it will be playing games with reality and narrative and with our perceptions and our expectations of both. While it may seem like an art film, and indeed it is an art film, it’s also very playful and tongue-in-cheek. Perhaps surprisingly for such an intellectually ambitious film it’s a lot of fun and it was a major box-office hit.

Three people have boarded the Trans-Europ-Express in Brussels. They are movie people (a producer, a screenwriter-director and a script girl)  and they start working on ideas for their next project. It will be a film called Trans-Europ-Express. It will be a thriller and will of course it will be set on the train. When they notice famous movie star Jean-Louis Trintignant on the train they decide that he will play the lead rôle, of the drug smuggler Elias. Right away we’re put in a position where reality and make-believe intersect. Is it actor Jean-Louis Trintignant we’re seeing on the train or Elias the drug-runner?

Of the three movie people the producer is played by one of the actual producers of the movie, the screenwriter-director is played by Alain Robbe-Grillet himself and the script girl by his wife Catherine Robbe-Grillet. So this is a movie by Alain Robbe-Grillet called Trans-Europ-Express about a writer-director played by Alain Robbe-Grillet who is planning a movie called Trans-Europ-Express. Yes, it’s all very postmodern.

We watch as the story being developed by the three film people unfolds. At times they decide that a particular scene doesn’t work so the scene we’ve just watched is in fact a discarded scene. Scenes also get revised. The story changes as we watch it.

That’s an interesting idea it itself but perhaps not entirely original. Fortunately however Robbe-Grillet adds some further touches and some further levels of unreality and artifice and it becomes much more unclear what we’re really seeing. Much more unclear, but more and more interesting. There are a number of games being played and there’s no certainty who’s doing the playing and who’s being played.

Elias has to buy an empty suitcase and then exchange it for another, containing the drugs. But it doesn't contain the drugs. The gang he is working for is playing games as well, testing him. He is provided with a gun but told he cannot use it. He is given a series of cryptic instructions which have him running all over the city. Various suitcases appear and disappear. Mysterious passwords are exchanged.

One suitcase contains his personal belongings, the things he ways takes with him when he travels. Things like a toothbrush, a razor, his pyjamas and of course a rope and a chain. Elias always carries a rope and a chain with him when he travels. Because you never know when you’re going to meet a girl and if you do you’ll need the rope and the chain.

Elias this he’s being followed but the men tailing him could be from the gang or from a rival gang or from the police.

He meets a beautiful young whore named Eva (played by Marie-France Pisier). She invites him back to her place. He tells her he’s not interested in sex, he’s only interested in rape. She assures him that will be no problem, but it will cost extra. It’s lucky he brought that rope and chain with him.

He really doesn’t know whether any of the people he meets can be trusted or for whom they’re working The viewer also doesn’t know that. And of course the three film people creating the story don’t know either, since they’re writing the story as they go. A character might be a gang member but they might later decide he’s actually a policeman.

The acting isn’t quite conventional and it’s not supposed to be. The performances are either deliberately theatrical or rather flat or they’re exaggerated because after all the writer hasn’t decided on the characters’ personalities yet. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays his part like a puppet, which of course is what he is. So when judging the performances you have to keep this in mind - they’re giving the performances that Robbe-Grillet wanted. Jean-Louis Trintignant is playing Jean-Louis Trintignant playing Elias in a script that is only partially written.

Marie-France Pisier as Eva handles this well. Playing kinky sex games with Elias she is an actress playing the part of an actress playing the part of a prostitute and of course a successful prostitute has to be an actress anyway. She seems amused and seems to be enjoying herself although at moments there’s a flash of fear in her eyes, but naturally in such a situation a whore would want to seem a little bit frightened to please her client.

She assures Elias that she’s not really a whore but at the same time she makes it quite clear to him that that is what she is. She’s a good prostitute and she knows that some clients want the girl to be a whore and some want her to be a nice girl. She’s happy to act either part. The customer is always right. It’s obvious that having one of the two lead characters be an actor playing a part and having the other be a prostitute who can be whatever you want her to be was a carefully considered choice on Robbe-Grillet’s part.

It’s obvious that the film that the three film people are planning is not going to be an art film. It’s going to be a potboiler. It’s intended to be very much in the style of the Lemmy Caution potboilers (such as Poison Ivy) that were so popular in Europe in the 50s and early 60s. In fact I suspect that the audience would immediately say to themselves that this is just like a Lemmy Caution movie and that that is probably what Robbe-Grillet would expect them to think. Robbe-Grillet might be playing complex intellectual games with his viewers but in this film he seems to be having a lot of fun as well, and he seems to want the audience to have fun as well.

The Trans-Europ-Express itself is a vital part of the movie (which was shot in part on the actual train). It’s a wonderful trains with its huge glass windows. Robbe-Grillet claims that his original inspiration for the movie came from the train and from seeing the whores displaying themselves in shop windows in Hamburg (as they do, or at least did, in a number of European cities). Whores in shop windows feature in the film. Is one of the whores Eva? Are they all Eva? She claims that she doesn’t do the shop window thing, but like everything else in the movie we can’t be sure.

Like most of Robbe-Grillet’s movies it contains a generous helping of kinkiness. There is some nudity and there’s some bondage, both of which probably helped it a good deal at the box office (and managed to get it banned in the UK). The scene of the nude dancer on the revolving stage (shot at the legendary Crazy Horse cabaret in Paris) is particularly striking and unsettling, and by 1966 standards it has to be said that she reveals an extraordinary amount of naked flesh. S&M elements are found in all of Robbe-Grillet’s films and reflect his own tastes and that of his wife (Catherine Robbe-Grillet was the author of one of the most famous of all S&M novels). It’s something that made his films controversial but in this case it works, adding an extra touch of strangeness and surrealism. And the sexual fetishism reflects the way the movie fetishes the technique of film itself. It also adds a hint of voyeurism, appropriate in a movie about the voyeurist nature of movies. This is a movie in which all of Robbe-Grillet’s obsessions come together with complete success.

I saw this movie years ago in a hideous grey-market pan-and-scan version. Happily the transfer provided by the BFI in their Alain Robbe-Grillet: Six Films boxed set (which is available in both DVD and Blu-Ray editions) is widescreen anamorphic and it’s superb. The extras include an interview with Robbe-Grillet and one with his Catherine Robbe-Grillet plus an excellent audio commentary by Tim Lucas. An interesting point made by Lucas is that Trans-Europ-Express was a major influence on Jess Franco’s 1968 movie Necronomicon. This is a movie that you appreciate a lot more when you watch it the second time with the commentary.

While Trans-Europ-Express shares quite a bit thematically with his earlier L’Immortelle it also marked a change of direction where tone is concerned- it’s much more playful and exuberant. Robbe-Grillet is thoroughly enjoying himself and wants the viewer to enjoy the proceedings as well. A great movie. Very highly recommended.

Alain Robbe-Grillet’s L’immortelle (1963)

L’immortelle (The Immortal One), released in 1963, was Alain Robbe-Grillet’s first film as director. He was already reasonably well known as a novelist and as the co-writer of the classic film Last Year at Marienbad which came out in 1961. Last Year at Marienbad is a movie that has puzzled, delighted and exasperated viewers ever since and many viewers will have similar reactions to L’immortelle. It certainly is one weird-ass movie. The cinematic world of Alain Robbe-Grillet is a very strange world (albeit a fascinating one).

L’immortelle was shot on location in Istanbul, which was one of the conditions Robbe-Grillet had to accept in order to be able to make the film. As it happens he was delighted, Istanbul having been where he met his wife and thus being a city with all sorts of romantic connotations for him. And this movie is a love story. Of sorts.

A man (we later discover that his name is Andre), newly arrived in the city, meets a woman (played by Françoise Brion). She tells him her name is Leila. She seems to be French but she tells I’m that she isn’t. She later tells him her name is Lale. He is immediately besotted by her. And she seems to be interested in him. She does however seem to be holding back. She will promise to meet him, but not show up. And then suddenly she will show up. When she disappears he tries to find her but nobody seems to know anything about her.

Perhaps she is running away from someone. It could be the man with the dogs. Is she his wife or his daughter?

Or perhaps she might even be his slave. There are mentions of girls being kept as slaves. And she sometimes behaves in a manner that might suggest she is a slave, or of course it might also suggests that she enjoys playing at being a slave, or even that she’d like Andre to enslave her. It might be worth pointing out that Catherine Robbe-Grillet, the director’s wife (who plays a supporting rôle in the film), was the author of the celebrated sado-masochistic novel L’Image (filmed by Radley Metzger in 1974 as The Image). And sado-masochistic themes recur in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s filmography.

It also seems that there is someone watching Lale. There is someone watching Andre as well. And Andre seems to be watching people as well. He’s watching the man who is watching him. Perhaps Lale is a spy. Perhaps Andre is a spy. Of course while these characters are watching each other we, the audience, are watching them watch each other.

Andre continues to pursue Lale. She continues to puzzle him, sometimes being stand-offish, sometimes being flirtatious, sometimes being just mysterious. He grows more and more obsessed, she grows more elusive.

There are also the doubles. Lale has a double, or perhaps more than one double.

And then they go for a drive and things get really strange.

If you read synopses and reviews of this film elsewhere you’ll find that they reveal rather a lot of plot details, in my view perhaps too many. I do not intend to do that. Some of the events of the story may in retrospect seem inevitable but I personally think it’s better to just experience the film.

All I will say is that Andre runs through the events of the story over and over in his mind, trying to make sense of them, trying to make sense of the girl’s actions and his own.

It’s not just the events of the movie that are odd and unsettling. The entire style of film-making is odd and unsettling, with lots of scenes in which people do not move. They do not move at all. They are like figures in a painting.

You don’t expect a straightforward linear narrative in a Robbe-Grillet film and you don’t get one here. But the narrative is perhaps not quite as non-linear as it appears to be, once you figure out what is going on. And you do figure out what is going on. The essential mystery does become clear. Or at least there are several related possible solutions to the mystery. There are several very definite clues (which I don’t intend to reveal). There are other mysteries in the film that remain mysteries.

You may become frustrated at times, felling that the director is just playing games with you. Of course he is playing games with you, that’s the whole point of the exercise, but he doesn’t actually cheat. If you stick with it you’ll find that the possible explanations make sense. Although it should be added that Robbe-Grillet had definite surrealist tendencies so the film makes sense on its own artistic terms rather than on the terms that we associate with everyday reality.

The black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous.

This is, as Robbe-Grillet admits, the Istanbul that tourists expect to see and this is deliberate. While Andre doesn’t like to think of himself as a tourist he is one really, seeing the Istanbul he expects to see. The fact that this might not be the real Istanbul is irrelevant. And this is significant. In the Istanbul of Andre’s tourist imagination white slavery still exists and there are still harems filled with slave girls  (in fact the Turkish government had closed all the harems forty years earlier). The Istanbul of Andre’s imagination is also a place filled with spies (the city having been the setting for countless spy thrillers). So Andre is a man who expects Istanbul to be a city of intrigue, which may well colour his responses to some of the woman’s actions.

The British Film Institute has released this movie as part of a boxed set (on both DVD and Blu-Ray) called Alain Robbe-Grillet: Six Films 1963-1974. The anamorphic transfer looks lovely. The extras include an audio commentary by Tim Lucas and a fairly lengthy interview with the director (who comes across as an extraordinarily jovial and open sort of guy who loves talking about his movies).

There are thematic and stylistic similarities between L’immortelle and Last Year at Marienbad (and a few direct visual references) but also important differences. L’immortelle is not in any sense merely a rehash of Last Year at Marienbad.

L’immortelle, being made in 1963, does not possess the full-blown eroticism of later Robbe-Grillet movies such as La Belle Captive but the eroticism is certainly there.

Critics and audiences at the time were lukewarm about this movie, perhaps because Andre is (intentionally) a colourless protagonist and they felt that the film dragged a little in the middle third when Lale temporarily disappears. L’immortelle is still a strange surreal but fascinating film. Highly recommended.

Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

Last Year at Marienbad is a movie I’ve wanted to see for years. It’s a movie that sharply divided opinion when it was released in 1961, and it’s a movie that continue to annoy people who dislike any semblance of artiness in their movies. And Last Year at Marienbad is certainly arty. I fact it’s the apotheosis of the European art film.

At some unspecified time a group of people are staying at a hotel. These people are curiously devoid of emotion and indeed seem hardly alive. One man, whose name we never learn, tries to convince a woman (also unnamed) that they had a love affair a year ago, at Marienbad. Or at least it may have been Marienbad. She has no memory of the affair. He tries to persuade her to leave with him. There is another man, who may be her husband. Or possibly not her husband. The guests spend their time playing games, including an odd game played with matchsticks, or cards, or any objects at all. One of the guests tells the others he could lose at this game, but he never has.

If it sounds enigmatic to begin with, it steadily becomes more enigmatic. Who are these people? Are they real? Did the unnamed man and woman really meet a year ago at Marienbad, or possibly somewhere else? This is a movie that doesn’t just reject conventional narrative, it rejects conventional characterisation as well. Alain Resnais, who directed the film, had created something of a sensation a couple of years earlier with his debut feature, Hiroshima Mon Amour, while scriptwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet went on to direct movies himself. Last Year at Marienbad could be described as hardcore New Wave.

While it is on the surface lacking in emotion, it is deeply disturbing and strangely affecting. The black-and-white cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, and the settings (it was filmed I believe at a castle in Germany) are magnificent.

The Region 2 DVD includes an introduction to the film and a documentary, both of which are fascinating and illuminating and shed light on the many different interpretations of this film. One interesting suggestion in the documentary is that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining could almost be considered to be a remake of Last Year at Marienbad. The more I think about it the more I tend to agree. This is a movie that you may find exasperating, or intriguing, or utterly fabulous. I adored it.