Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime

Bulbous womb or mind hive?

Alain Resnais' Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime, from just before 1968, starts with the title bannered one phrase atop another, both in brilliant red. The first shot after the credits is that of a sign pointing to various surgical rooms. Like the title, a square sign in a 1.66:1 frame. The next shot is of a long corridor. Resnais ushers us into three dimensional space to meet our protagonist. He is Claude (Claude Rich) recovering from a suicide attempt over his failed relationship with Catrine (Olga Georges Picot).

Claude is depressed enough to hook up with a tech firm who claim to have constructed a time travel machine. The machine resembles a bulbous womb. An injection of "T-5" and Claude is ready to lie down in the machine and time travel. The trip is portrayed with editing tricks that predate Melies, but it is rather sweet of Resnais to trot out old cinematic magic to conjure unconscious memory. Unfortunately, Resnais is the arch rationalist of French directors. Here as in Last Year at Marienbad, we take a visual tour of the unconscious rather than an immersion. The film functions as a critique of the fruits of rationality: technology and the mind hive state. Both brought to their knees currently by Mother Nature.

This critique is a noble tradition in film, going back to Feuillade and Lang. Nevertheless, Resnais' style is too twee for the material. Man here is a mouse in a kooky labyrinth, as in ...Marienbad and Mon oncle d'Amerique. The scientists hubbub about the lab that seems leftover from a George Pal film. Rapid cuts help us jump around Claude's memories of his time with Catrine, but the relationship is not established as anything but an abstract concept. As I implied by citing the geometry of the opening, that may be Resnais' intent. The film hops around a bit, but is never unsettling. Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime is a rational explanation of life as a bad dream, but Resnais has no feel for madness or the unconscious. 

Because this is a critique of rationalism and technology, the experiment goes horribly wrong. Because Claude is such a flimsy character, his plight never amounts to more than a string of enervating images. Even the possibility that he murdered Catrine is more of a red herring than a dramatic crux. Only obliquely connected in his sense of disconnection, Resnais is a product of Cartesian dualism and it chokes the soul out of this film.

The film was poorly received at the time and it is easy to see why. Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime has as much to do with the spirit of 68 as that other film maudit of that era, Tati's Playtime. If not the complete debacle that its reputation implied, the film is only for the most implacable defenders of Resnais.