Die Unsterbliche

First off, let me qualify my comment by saying that the print of this film I saw was of low quality and that makes it a bit hard to judge the visuals-I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt as they seem good from what I can tell.

L'Immortelle is about a French professor who takes a teaching post in Istanbul and finds himself in an alien society. As there are many tourists who travel to this area because of a fascination with the Byzantine era, the natives play up that aspect of their culture for everyone. Through the comments of the mysterious woman to that effect, the film calls the authenticity of the architecture and artwork into question again and again. While this may sound like it leads to a portrayal of the city that makes it seem fake, the opposite is actually true. The fake city that is shown off to tourists hides mysteries that are near impenetrable. The willingness of the natives to share the false culture is a perfect excuse for keeping the truth hidden.

The plot of the film focuses on the professor's encounters (and attempts at romance) with a mysterious woman. She constantly deceives him in a way that is similar to the deceptions of the city itself to outsiders. Paradoxically, she actually points out the faux culture that surrounds them while maintaining her own deceptions. Viewers who are looking for meaning here may see her mystery as a symbol for that of the city the film explores.

Eventually the woman disappears from our protagonist's life and despite all of his efforts to find out more about her he ultimately fails to learn anything definite. Like the viewer, he is left to ponder what (if anything) his experiences mean.

As a frame of reference, one might say that L'Immortelle is like a combination of L'Avventura and Last Year at Marienbad. Like the former film it includes an unsolvable mystery and like the latter it uses the language of cinema to call memory itself into question (late in L'Immortelle there are remembered versions of scenes from earlier in the film that are different from the originals). Still, L'Immortelle lacks the clarity and coherence of either of those films, making it a minor albeit unjustly ignored classic.

Alain Robbe-Grillet was the writer of LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, this is one of my favorite movies of all time. I must revisit it though, because there have been many years since i watched it. And Time changes everything.

Robbe- Grillet wrote this movie too. He is the director as well. I liked it but i can understand the reasons why many people won't. It's almost inaccessible. It's too mysterious to call it a mystery movie, i am joking obviously, i just want to emphasize that this is so weird and obscure that i couldn't be sure even if there is a mystery here or a riddle or the creator just plays with viewers' minds. Is there a mystery here to solve or the viewers should just dive in their subconscious, without thinking it too much?

Is Constantinopole a mythical city here, a place that exists only in dreams because in reality, there are all fake, as the female character keeps repeating? Is it just a scenery for our deepest feelings to rise on the surface? Or a "real" city in which bad things and criminal activities are taking place?

I liked this movie because it made me contemplate about many things. Françoise Brion is unbelieavably gorgeous. I loved its narrative and the way that certain scenes keep repeating but not exactly the same. It was like a circle, the end is the beginning is the end. Like a cinematic "Ouroboros". Like Nietzsche's Eternal Return.

I can't rate it higher because it is too cryptic and i am not even sure it is brilliant or the director just being enigmatic for the sake of enigmas. It's more likely this is a STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE movie. Still, if you find it interesting as it was desribed here, watch it.

"Immortal" is an odd word for a film which is a chronicle of two characters' deaths foretold. Alain Robbe-Grillet's directorial debut has the circular dream logic and preordained destinies often found in his later films. The heroine (Francoise Brion) may not be physically tied up, unlike actresses in his S&M-heavy later features, but she is just as trapped. The enigmatic, surrealistic, non-linear story-telling remains a breath of fresh air, but the abuse of stereotypes (e.g., exoticizing the Istanbul settings and associating all Turkish men with Ottoman Harems) makes _L'Immortelle_ feel dated.

_L'Immortelle_ sends me back to _Last Year at Marienbad_. Resnais's 1961 film, with screenplay solely credited to Robbe-Grillet, probably sheds light on what the latter intended in his own directorial work; the differences are telling too.

I haven't seen _Marienbad_ in decades.

After this viewing, it strikes me as an author wrestling with a fictional heroine who has a mind of her own. He imposes his words and memory on her, strangles the last drop of autonomy out of his invention, tries to bully her into submission by the sheer force of repetition (although the narrator seems to get confused by his own voice too!). In fact, Robbe-Grillet has published 4 well-regarded, avant garde novels by 1961. In this respect, _L'Immortelle_ is like _Marienbad_. There are numerous other similarities in the acting styles of the supporting characters, the tracking shots, and the editing.

The main difference is the actress playing the heroine. Robbe-Grillet supposedly didn't like Delphine Seyrig for _Marienbad_; in his own film 2 years later he chose the voluptuous Francoise Brion for her pliant poses. There would be plenty more such vacant female characters in _The Beautiful Prisoner_, _Playing with Fire_, _Gradiva_ ...

The slim, bird-like Seyrig cannot be more different. With her head tilted, her sharp elbow folded at acute angles, and her even sharper guffaw, she wordlessly creates a counter-narrative. This must be why Resnais picked her. (Seyrig also starred in the almost-as-ambiguous _India Song_. Elizabeth Debicki, who loves to tilt her long frame, may be Seyrig's spiritual descendent.)

It would be unfair to compare the image quality of _Marienbad_ and _L'Immortelle_, since I streamed the latter off Tubi. No one can match the early Resnais's tracking shots, but _L'Immortelle_ is certainly well framed and thought-provoking.

Watch it while you still can on Tubitv.

Robbe-Grillet's brilliant first film, just a year after writing the screenplay for Last year in Marienbad (so detailed that it's impossible not to assign autorship of the film as much to him as to Alain Resnais).

It is interesting to compare the two works, and to note that the narrative and structural innovations of the film directed by Resnais are a constant in Robbe-Grillet's work, both literary and cinematographic. Unfortunately, the stupid author theory has always privileged the director over the screenwriter.

Resnais certainly endowed Last year in Marienbad with an incredible visual sophistication, an elegance and beauty in the images and an affectation in the interpretations, and it is true that his previous and subsequent work shows an absolute harmony with the material. Also, more importantly, he developed unprecedented abilities in editing. But underneath this cosmetics and this fascinating packaging, the constants of Robbe-Grillet's work underlie.

L'immortelle is more abrupt, more visually direct, obsessed with space-time raccord discontinuities, but also based on disorientation, on falsehoods, on the reworkings of the mind, on the repetition of the same images with different meanings, on the transforming capacity of the memory. It is, yes, much warmer and more sensual, renouncing the icy formal perfection that results so much in distance in Resnais's work.

That sensuality, will lead in later works of Robbe-Grillet more and more in an annoying sadomasochistic aberration, and in an undoubted misogyny that reaches the delusional.

In L'Immortelle, a suspicious and unexpressive protagonist finds himself trapped in a fantasy that involves a woman and a city, both equally mysterious, deceitful and beautiful, in the threatening presence of a controlling corporation made up of neighbors, street vendors, bar customers, fishermen, led by a sinister character with sunglasses and accompanied at all times by a couple of imposing dogs.

The scenes, as in all of the auteur's films, matter for themselves, for the narrative paths they seem to open, for where they point, rather than as links in a linear story that does not exist. Robbe-Grillet centers them on clichés of the most commercial and serial cinema, flattering the viewer's imagination, as if it were a noir or mistery film, using exotic and fascinating sets ( in this case Istanbul shows all its mystery, its fascination, its decadent charm, its supposedly threatening background, and its most picturesque corners). But time and again Robbe-Grillet ends up disenchanting the viewer, or leaving him in suspense, when everything is shown as a simple decoy, as a false trail that leads nowhere.

The film could suffer from a story that is too basic and is assumed to be unimportant, a simple starting point for Robbe-Grillet juggling, which can be a bit tiresome in the middle of the film. But Robbe-Grillet knows when to take the puzzle apart to assemble the pieces differently, and thereby regain the attention of the possibly distracted viewer in time.

Robbe-Grillet would continue down this same path, breaking down soap opera stories into increasingly clever and cerebral games, but also stripping female leads more and more naked, and subjecting them to increasingly unacceptable mistreatment and torture.

While the print of this one was more pleasing than the other Robbe-Grillet titles I watched to commemorate his recent passing, the viewing itself was marred by a couple of instances of temporary freezing. The film, then, was perhaps the most pretentious and, well, tedious of the lot – given that there’s hardly any discernible plot!

Again, we’re thrown into a remote Arabian locale (complete with relentless – and, consequently, extremely irritating – religious chanting) with, at its centre, a glamorous yet vapid femme fatale in Francoise Brion – to whom the title is presumably referring. Frankly, I’m at pains to recall just what went on in the film – even if only a little over 36 hours have elapsed since then…which is never a good thing but, usually, this is a predicament I find myself in after having watched some mindless/low-brow action flick and not a respected art-house one! What’s certain is that, as a film about the search for a missing enigmatic girl, it’s far less compelling and satisfying than Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA (1960)! Incidentally, the bewildered hero of THE IMMORTAL ONE is played by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze – who happens to be a film-maker in his own right, actually one of the lesser (and, therefore, least-known) exponents of the “Nouvelle Vague”.

Though I have to admit that – in the long run – I was disappointed by the mini-marathon dedicated to this influential novelist and highbrow film-maker, I’d still be interested in checking out the other efforts he directed (not to mention hope to catch these three again in better representations and, perhaps, a more amenable frame-of-mind). In any case, I still have Alain Resnais’ demanding but highly-acclaimed LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD (1961) – which Robbe-Grillet wrote, and for which he even garnered an Oscar nomination – to re-acquaint myself with, and that is sure to be an infinitely more rewarding experience...