1/10
A miss for the miss, and the boys as well
28 October 2013
Je t'aime, je t'aime (Alain Resnais, 1968, 91')

My last film review for amazon (uk and us) was Vilgot Sjöman's I am Curious (Yellow- Blue) (1967-1968, 122'-93') of 30/5/2013 for amazon uk. Today's is my first review again after a nearly five month break. I mainly used the time to further develop my publication of "bloc notes", a cultural record, containing amazon film reviews, film book reviews and revIews of some Malaysia Philharmonic Orchestra (mpo) performances. My new film series (ie No 251 onwards) will first review a series of films which have been neglected for a variety of reasons, mostly unavailability of minimum quality copies. The reviews here are also meant to complement some earlier country or author series. - Now the movie:

>>>In this provocative sci-fi drama from Alain Resnais, a man wakes up in a hospital after an attempted suicide. He has invented a time machine that has proved effective, but only transports the subject back in time for one minute. Upon his release, he gets his hands on the machine to go back to a time he fondly remembers spending with a woman he apparently has feelings about. The two stroll on the beach before she leaves for Scotland. He follows her, but tragedy ensues and it is not clear if he has killed her or if she died an accidental death. The time-machine angle of the film features a dreamlike series of flashbacks making it unclear if the action is presently unfolding or is merely a vague memory from the past. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi/IMDb<<<

The Wikipedia free encyclopedia Alain Resnais article gives much more material on Resnais' work, but tends to overvalue his achievements, This film was meant to be presented at Cannes 1968, but expecting from radio news the chaos which then ensued, Alain Resnais broke his train journey to Cannes at Lyons and turned back to Paris. The festival was cancelled, the film was lost for a festival presentation and hence never really made it into the commercially relevant distribution circuit. Accordingly, it was near-impossible to get hold of a copy - no DVD's then, and DVD's now, but not released until very recently (I waited four years for it), still highly priced. The film was not worth any of these efforts. A bit nouveau roman, a bit love and death philosophy, the whole in a very old fashioned, very petit-bourgeois Belgian university environment, late Victorian, science hocus-pocus, but catholic? Acting flat, Claude Rich his worst, so Olga Georges-Picot, the rest of actors (if that is the word) an amateurish bunch of no skills. Bad, useless, horrible. Perhaps Resnais' worst.

251 - Je t'aime, je t'aime (Alain Resnais, 1968, 91') -A miss for the miss, and the boys as well – 29/10/2013
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