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Birth of the bomb and end of the affair, Alain Resnais shuffles the shards. ("Paint not the thing but the effect it produces," says Mallarmé.) The image is from Viaggio in Italia, the dust covering the intertwined bodies is not volcanic ash but glistering fallout, such is love after Hiroshima. The French actress "like a thousand women in one" (Emmanuelle Riva) and the Japanese soldier turned architect (Eiji Okada), murmurs over grievous footage: Twisted metal in the museum and charred children in the hospital, she's seen it all, "rien" is his repeated retort. A one-night stand unspools trauma accumulated since 1945, a twitch of a hand is enough for a split-second memory to jab the unconsciousness like a needle. (Punishment and madness after the fling with the German soldier back in Nevers, the Liberation glimpsed through a grilled cellar window.) Therapy time in the tea room. "Why deny the obvious necessity of remembering?" Shock, fear, indifference, fear of indifference, the progression of modernity. A Marguerite Duras blueprint, a pas de deux of anguish and desire to be recited in a daze. From this libretto, Resnais shifts the very skin of film: Tracking shots and parallel montage in continuous play, the up-angle camera gliding through phosphorescent streets to lay bare the tangle of mind and history. "A time will come when we can no longer name what it is that binds us." The idyllic French countryside comes equipped with a dungeon for collaborators, Japan is an impassive crone wedged between lovers on a bench. A most chic Guernica, a sonata by Delerue and Fusco. "Dime-store romance, I consign you to oblivion." Rendezvous at the Casablanca café, "difficult music heard for the first time" (Beckett). Roeg, Wong and Soderbergh take its lessons to heart, in due time Resnais turns the verdure on the scorched ground into a madcap emblem (Wild Grass). Cinematography by Sacha Vierny and Michio Takahashi. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |