I Love You, I Love You

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Taylor L All you diehard fans of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind need to hop on this seldom-mentioned Alain Resnais film; the disjointed, fractured storytelling about a tormented relationship that Charlie Kaufman kneaded into critical adoration was pioneered by Resnais here, and Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime may have ended up a classic on par with the director's own Hiroshima Mon Amour or Last Year at Marienbad, if perhaps not for the surprise cancellation of Cannes due to the May 68 movement. In this film, a man (Claude Rich's Claude Ridder) departs from the hospital after a suicide attempt only to be immediately picked up by a pair of strange men, who whisk him away to a countryside retreat where they dabble in time experiments. Here, Claude is recruited to be the first human to go back in time, but the experiment goes slightly awry, turning his brief journey into a fragmented retelling of much of his own life, particularly the evolution of his relationship with his lover Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot). While the use of the time machine itself is less about giving Claude an opportunity for self-realization than it is about allowing the audience a peak into his character, emotional pain, and past misdeeds (thinking back to how well Kaufman integrated the mechanic into his protagonist's story), there's still a very clever sense of imagination in the use of time travel and the retrofuturistic designs associated with making it a reality - the time machine itself has an organic, almost cloudlike design to it - and much of this creativity comes courtesy of famed French science fiction author Jacques Sternberg. The big limitation of Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime is its tendency to tread over the same ground with an incremental sense of story progression, but a film of this radical design with such a prominent director should probably get more recognition even it has all the melodrama and theatrics of a very French love story. (3.5/5) Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/17/23 Full Review Audience Member Alain Resnais' abstract study in love and time travel; quite interesting. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/27/23 Full Review Audience Member A French sci-fi back in the 1970s. Interesting in premise but so broken & fragmented when executing. Rated 1.5/5 Stars •  Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars 02/04/23 Full Review Audience Member Perhaps taking a cue from his friend Chris Marker, Alain Resnais tackles time travel in his fifth fiction feature. A bunch of scientists convince Claude Rich to serve as their guinea pig in a risky experiment after a failed suicide attempt suggests to them (or their computer) that he might not care if he dies in the process (although mice have survived in the earlier trials). As intriguing as this is, Resnais takes the premise and makes an even more insane film than you would expect. It turns out that, rather than spending one discrete minute in the past (a year prior) as intended, Rich gets stuck in an endless loop bouncing around his past. This allows Resnais to show us various scenes from his life (pre-suicide attempt) in a Burroughs-styled cut-and-pasted jumbled order for the next 60 minutes. So, this is a film of wall-to-wall non sequiturs and I say keep 'em coming. The puzzle to be solved involves piecing together the events of a life from these snippets. But even if you let the moments wash impressionistically over you, a gestalt still emerges. Perhaps Resnais (who died this year) was trying to represent our fragmented stream-of-consciousness which dips in and out of the past, remembering moments here and there, and consequently influencing our present, emotionally, cognitively, behaviourally -- and doing it with science fiction. For this, I hereby dub him the grand master of high concept (but truly Resnais's themes of time, memory, and longing are a key to his greatness). Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 02/04/23 Full Review Audience Member There are moments of stunning brilliance and subtly hilarious dialogue. It doesn't go quite as far as I was hoping it would go with the premise. The true potential of the experiment is only hinted at and never fully explored. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/25/23 Full Review Audience Member Director Alain Resnais passed away relatively recently so I thought I'd check out another one of his films. This time it's about a man who recently recovered from a failed suicide attempt and he's recruited by a group of scientists experimenting on time travel. They send him back in time a year before his suicide attempt (maybe more) and we see jump around scenes from his life. It seems Resnais took the concept of jump cuts and ran away with it with this one. The film, under its time travel conceit, jumps around different time periods and challenges the audience to actively piece together what exactly happened. At one point it even makes you question whether or not you're seeing is real. Like "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Last Year at Marienbad", this film is also about an unconventional love story and just as great as those two films. Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 02/17/23 Full Review Read all reviews

I Love You, I Love You

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