Questo impossibile oggetto

It's oddly appropriate that John Frankenheimer's Story of a Love Story was never properly released, and is very hard to see now - the title suggests a distancing (if not plain redundancy), whereas the alternative title Impossible Object threatens to disappear altogether. The love story, if such it is, is between an English writer (Alan Bates, in provocative, improvisatory-feeling form) living in France with an American wife and a houseful of kids, and the French wife (Dominique Sanda, one of the most beguilingly watchful of actresses ) of an older French husband, mother of a single daughter. The film moves around within their timeline of their relationship, further destabilizing itself through the insertion of fantasy sequences from Bates' imagination, or from another imagination altogether - at various times the movie (which, if nothing else, never seems to be merely coasting) seems to explicitly evoke Fellini (as in a nudity-strewn dream sequence) and Antonioni (the title also evokes his Cronaca di un amore, and Lea Massari from L'Avventura enters with Bates into a vaguely Don't Look Now-ish tumble of sexual positions) and a generalized on-the-fly kind of New Wave-ish ness. It's hard to know what the (at least to that point) usually tougher-contoured Frankenheimer wanted out of such a project, if not to disappear within it, perhaps to renew himself through an exercise in evasiveness (although with his wife Evans Evans hovering in the role of Bates' wife and providing a vague tether). Complaints about the film's inconsequentiality hardly seem fair in this context - it seems designed to perpetually recede (as love usually does, I suppose), shifting for a while into exotic dreaminess and then into sustained, piercing tragedy, before veering away again into quizzical possibilities. The film's pretty visuals and ingratiating aspects perhaps made it too easy to dismiss (certainly something did) but it's genuinely, surprisingly rewarding.