Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime (1968)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime (1968) – A. Resnais

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).