NYFF 2012: "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet"

In 2007 I had the great priv­ilege of doing a tele­phone inter­view with Alain Resnais. It was a very gen­i­al con­ver­sa­tion that alighted ona vari­ety of top­ics, one of which, no sur­prise, was his still-contentious 1961 col­lab­or­a­tion with the late writer/filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last Year At Marienbad. The movie still tends to be viewed by some through crit­ic Pauline Kael’s rather stub­bornly dense read­ing of it—the gist of it being that it’s one of the pic­tures that inspired her mot about “come dressed as the sick soul of Europe” cos­tume parties—so I dis­cussed it with Resnais with an emphas­is on its more form­ally play­ful aspects, which include the appear­ance of a card­board cutout of Alfred HItchcock and a pas­tiche of the Hollywood clas­sic Gilda. He was not unre­cept­ive to my per­spect­ive, but also gently cau­tioned against the notion of char­ac­ter­iz­ing the whole thing as some kind of meta romp. As his inter­pret­er put it, “Yes, there are some very funny jokes in Marienbad. But […Resnais] hopes it does­n’t take away from the tragedy.”

And so. Resnais’ latest pic­ture, You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, opens with some good jokes, begin­ning with its title, which her­alds back to a dif­fer­ent tech­no­lo­gic­al turn­ing point in the his­tory of film. The design of the title sequence, which does not but might as well incor­por­ate the image of a fly­ing uni­corn, evokes a par­tic­u­lar faux-grandiose Euro-cheesiness that’s also quite amus­ing. Then there’s the con­ceit of the movie itself. A flatbed-truck-load of great French act­ors, from Amalric to Wilson and with Arditi, Azema, Consigny, Girardot, and Piccoli and many oth­ers in between, are seen being summoned by phone to the château of a dear friend, a play­wright named Antoine d’Anthac. Antoine’s gone and died, and he wanted these friends to attend the read­ing of his will and test­a­ment. And so this amaz­ing cast hies to an ornate CGI-rendered moun­tain retreat, where they are greeted by an unusu­ally cheery Antoine via posthum­ous video. Turns out he wants to go over old times, par­tic­u­larly his play Eurydice, which vari­ous mem­bers of this cast, we learn, por­trayed in vari­ous pro­duc­tions over the years. There’s anoth­er theat­er com­pany work­ing up a ver­sion, Antoine tells the renowned thespi­ans, and he wants their feed­back on their ver­sion of the play. Which then begins on the big-screen dis­play in Antoine’s home theat­er. And the cast assembled for the read­ing of Antoine’s will begins to inter­act with what’s on screen, cre­at­ing a mashup, if you will, wherein most of the entirety of Eurydice, a 20^th-century gloss on the Orpheus myth, plays out for the viewer—that’s you, and/or me. 

If you’re some­what famil­i­ar with 20^th-century European drama, and/or have paid atten­tion to the movie’s open­ing cred­its, you’ll com­pre­hend that this Eurydice is a real thing—it’s a play by Jean Anouilh that pred­ated Jean Cocteau’s cine­mat­ic gloss on the Orpheus myth by sev­er­al years. The two have little in com­mon, as it hap­pens, aside from the ancient-to-modern trans­pos­i­tion. The actors-called-to-a-playwright’s-will-reading con­ceit is ALSO adop­ted from an Anouilh play: a later, and alto­geth­er more obscure work entitled Dear Antoine, or, Failed Love. So there’s anoth­er set of mashup par­en­theses brack­et­ing the oppos­i­tion of the Resnais rep com­pany and the lesser-known act­ors in the fic­tion­al the­at­ric­al com­pany that they’re run­ning com­pet­ing ver­sions of Eurydice with.

All this sounds rather remark­ably impen­et­rably knotty and maybe impossibly French, and there’s a sense in which cul­tur­al spe­cificity seems kind of cru­cial to “get­ting” what’s going on here. (Because I’m a hor­rible per­son, I was highly amused to read a writeup by a VERY know-somethingish whip­per­snap­per in which he cited Antoine D’Anthac as a real play­wright, and Jean Anouilh as a fic­tion­al one. It’s like you’ve nev­er seen Waltz of the Toreadors or Becket or some­thing!) However. Once the con­ceit is suc­cess­fully real­ized and the Eurydice action moves for­ward while tog­gling in dif­fer­ent modes, the movie’s explor­a­tion of the art of act­ing and the fun­gible nature of what we call “tragedy” takes on a remark­able imme­di­acy that’s rendered more than slightly phant­asmagor­ic­al by the 90-year-old Resnais’ delight in the play of digit­al space. Most, if not all, of the set­ting inhab­ited by the act­ors trans­port­ing them­selves (and the audi­ence) in D’Anthac’s lair are digit­al sim­u­la­tions, from great halls that look like video-game foy­ers to ratty pen­sion bed­rooms wherein vari­ous iter­a­tions of Orpheus and Eurydice enact their pas­sion and domest­ic disputes. 

And while the view­er is tak­ing in all of the vari­ous fil­ters through which what is finally a very old and simple-as-Death story is being processed—and just to think, we ain’t seen noth­in’ yet!—that story, its ele­ment­al themes of pas­sion and mor­tal­ity, comes through in a very dir­ect way, via the per­form­ances and the way Resnais’ cam­era views them. The form­al innov­a­tions and sense of play aren’t dis­trac­tions from the emo­tion, rather, Resnais sug­gests, it is only through the rig­or­ous exer­cise of the ima­gin­a­tion that art is able to com­mu­nic­ate any­thing even sug­gest­ing the Real. There’ll be more to say when the pic­ture gets a prop­er release and the rest of you are able to see it; I’m happy to report that Kino Lorber was not at all intim­id­ated by its French-ness and will be releas­ing the film early next year.