Eden and After

Too artsy but the sex is okay. Scorpions are cool too.

If this were in English, you might think it was a particularly pretentious student film by some young director who wanted to get as many pretty women to submit to dubious situations as he could. Rather, it is the epitome of why even many French filmmakers turned to American features to revive their own cinema which so often veers towards this kind of aimless, flimsily produced exercise in some indistinct intellectual exploration. What is going on? Well, apparently some bored very bourgeois students are trying to find ways - literal or fantasized, it's not clear which - to spice up their boring hours in the school hangout (realistically portrayed as the kind of sterile glass and colored panelled institutional space many are). There's a kind of an older Svengali figure who leads them some semi-comprehensible, vaguely erotic games. There are references to death, self-inflicted or other. There are a number of beautiful shots of whitewashed buildings against blue skies in North Africa. You get a few women in cages (mysteriously keeping on blindfolds thought their hands are free) and one recurring fleeting shot of what looks like some serious bondage, a touch of David Lynch-style soft-porn lesbianism - something for everyone really who likes this kind of film at all, with no particular order or logic.

If you loved "Last Year at Marienbad", you might at least find this film intriguing. Otherwise, you might be relieved that French directors changed direction enough to come up with "Diva". ("Does this review contain spoilers?" They should probably come up with a prize for anyone who could MANAGE to write a spoiler for this film.)

The four out of ten rating is because, despite the slick, pretty surfaces of attractive youth and whitewashed Tunisian buildings, the film is so pretentious that the viewer soon loses interest in what it might all mean.More seriously, though, we are now living in a more enlightened age when the casual dehumanization of women, whether in the work of the filmmakers or in their off screen lives, has become unacceptable.some of this has been overdone, as iñ the cancel culture of Woody Allen, Roman Polanski and Jim Toback leading to the suppression of seeing their latest movies. But people seem to have forgotten how an esteemed French man of letters was able to trade off of sadism toward women in his work, and get away with it.there was already a warning in Robbe Grillet 's "Marenbad" script when the woman kept telling the man to leave her alone and he kept harassing her.Now in the 1970 film we get women stripped, assaulted, put in cages, whipped, tortured with scorpions, you name it.not that much different from what the Bush administration did to suspected terrorists at Guantanamo after 9-11.and some phony intellectuals lap it up and are titillated.

I knew of novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet chiefly by virtue of his script for Alain Resnais’ art-house masterpiece LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD (1961; which I intend to revisit in tribute to the author). Eventually, I became aware of his own films as a director via a thread on “The Latarnia Forums” – which, back then, had intrigued me a great deal and, in fact, was highly pleased to acquire three of them a few months ago. Unfortunately, the prints were incredibly murky – so I kind of lost my enthusiasm and it’s only now, in honor of his passing, that I made a concentrated effort to stick with them!

However, my first encounter with these titles proved a disappointment: as I said, the picture quality left a lot to be desired – but, frankly, so did the film itself! Judging by the celebrated Resnais work, I knew I’d be in for an oblique and possibly multi-layered piece – however, to be honest, I found it made little sense and that it was generally weird for weirdness’ sake! In fact, if I had to compare Robbe-Grillet’s style here with that of contemporaneous film-makers, I’d say this is Godard meets Antonioni meets Jodorowsky!; that, in itself, would sound like a most interesting proposition to some…but, I assure you, the film is a bit of a bore despite plenty of nudity (the writer-director seems to have a thing for sadomasochism, as can also be seen from TRANS-EUROP-EXPRESS [1966]) and a stunning-looking heroine in Catherine Jourdan (sporting cropped blonde hair).

The plot, such as it is, has to do with a group of disaffected students who are shown a way out of their ennui (via a concoction he offers) by a man they meet at a café (the Eden of the title); Jourdan is supposed to have a night-time tryst with him at a factory but, on arriving for the appointment, she is intimidated by some of her fellow students and finds the man dead! Taking a clue from a postcard of an Arabian town found in the stranger’s pocket, Jourdan gets mixed-up in espionage (the MacGuffin in this case being a valuable missing portrait), games of a sexual nature, drug-induced hallucinations and murder; eventually, we come full circle and the story returns to the Eden and the arrival once again of the stranger...

This film isn't as good as it could've been but it still has a lot of merit and is worth seeing. There is some extremely memorable and disturbing imagery that got under my skin. A lot of these scenes and images were very effective and a lot of them are still stuck in my mind long after watching the film.

The films presentation as a whole is very solid. With some great sound design, beautiful technicolor cinematography and usage of its Tunisian setting. My main issue with this film is that it didn't really have a point overall and the story itself wasn't compelling enough to make up for that. For example with the film Last Year at Marienbad (also scripted by Alain Robbe Grillet) it has a lot of thematic depth and tonnes going on underneath the surface. Which is helped significantly by the hypnotic atmosphere. Eden and After doesn't really have that.

There's not a lot to take away from it and the atmosphere/story isn't particularly compelling. Which does make the film a bit of a slog at points despite the relatively short runtime. The films disturbing sexual imagery, sound design and surreal scenes do help the film a lot. Though I wished those elements were used for a much more compelling, thought provoking and disturbing film overall.

Eden and After is still a really interesting movie with a lot of great things going for it. Though unfortunately it's rather underwhelming which prevents me from calling it one of the great psychedelic/surreal films of the period. If all of the positive elements of this movie were used for a better film. I think this movie could've easily have been on par with Salo, Climax and The Devils which do a lot of what this movie is going for more successfully.