Master Perspective

Private Fears in Public Places Directed by Alain Resnais

Anyone impressed by the gimmicky thriller, Memento, was probably ignorant of Alain Resnais, the filmmaker whose innovations with film form and experiments with time were trivialized by Memento’s flashback-in-reverse game. With such monumental 1960s films as Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad and Muriel, Resnais innovated the most confounding yet dazzling kinds of narrative. Those movies—all masterworks—are still intriguing, still amazing because they suggest inexhaustible possibilities for cinema as a new art form. Simply put: Resnais’ movies constructed images to represent cogitation, memory and imagination. Though easily copied, they were never matched; only traduced by movies like Memento, The Matrix and Stranger than Fiction—or unacknowledged by our timid and conventional contemporary film culture.

So it’s practically an aesthetic revival—and a career revival—to have Resnais’ 1964 Muriel playing Midtown at the Museum of Modern Art while downtown, the IFC center features the U.S. premiere of his latest film, Private Fears in Public Places. This matters because Resnais is the most influential yet least familiar filmmaker from that period Philip Lopate called the “heroic age of moviegoing.” Watching Private Fears gives one that ’60s heroic feeling due to Resnais’ still-challenging emphasis on form. This highly stylized French version of Alan Ayckbourn’s English stage play proves how well cinematic form can be used to visualize spiritual connections between disparate people. In this case, lovelorn Parisians whose lives intersect and parallel.

From the first wide shot of a cityscape in winter, Resnais begins his typically elegant investigation of a space then interweaves portrayals—performances—of lives in time. Lambert Wilson and Laura Morante are a couple who delay their break-up by searching for a new apartment. Realtor Andre Dusollier becomes fascinated by risqué home videos loaned to him by his secretary, Sabine Azema, who moonlights as home care nurse to the bedridden father of a lonely bachelor (Claude Rich). These life stories are reflected/connected when Wilson answers a personal ad from Isabelle Carre, the realtor’s sister. This desperate encounter—like Wilson’s relationship with his baleful, watchful bartender (Pierre Arditi)—refines the film’s theme of anxious communication. Private Fears in Public Places is a surprisingly apt substitute for the original French title Coeurs since it spells out how, for Resnais, a film is much more than its plot but can offer a kaleidoscopic shifting of people, places, experiences. 

Cinematographer Eric Gautier’s images are bright, almost glaceéd and Herve de Luze’s editing pace matches the visual motif of a drifting snowfall. In addition to being a stone-serious experimenter, Resnais is always an exquisite craftsman. The film’s look of Christmassy enchantment emphasizes the story’s theatricality, yet this isn’t merely what used to be called “filmed theater.” There’s no hint of a proscenium in Resnais’ vision. It is most like Robert Altman’s miraculous theatrical films of the 1980s—especially Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Fool for Love, the most visually extravagant of Altman’s hybrid movies. Altman realized a relationship between language and image that was so seamless it appeared chimerical; critics have yet to credit its radicalism. But changing audience perspective on cinema and life is part of Resnais’ intent. His theater films (starting with Melo in 1986) distilled his once kinetic style, but now he returns to the audacious sumptuousness of Marienbad. Like Altman’s Beyond Therapy (a Broadway comedy that Altman mischievously filmed in Paris), Resnais ironically transforms Ayckbourn’s quintessentially British play into a French love roundelay, achieving an intellectual investigation of farce for its emotional acuity.

Resnais’ soulful depth often went unappreciated due to such high-modernist extremes as in the magnificent Marienbad. The sheer pleasure of the diaphanous transitions and color dissolves in Private Fears in Public Places and conveys the transcendent empathy that has always been part of Resnais’ genius. In Muriel, the rapid-fire montage of separate characters’ experiences implied a sense of existential simultaneity. Resnais also kept one mindful of critic Gregory Solman’s seminal Film Comment essay on Resnais called memory’s grip on consciousness—a unique insight into the morality of modern experience. His new film does this in astonishingly beautiful ways, featuring aching, eccentric characterizations like Wilson and Azema’s that are revelatory. Resnais even diagrams alienation in the overhead shot of Wilson and his soon-to-be ex touring an apartment—a scene Brian DePalma might envy for turning rich abstraction into an art tease. But Resnais’ tease surpasses Memento’s hipster gimmick because the great abstractionist is not afraid of showing heart.