R.I.P. Alain Resnais

There was a strange comfort not only knowing that Alain Resnais was “out there”, but that he was still making films, after eight decades of extraordinary work – EIGHT DECADES, and that those new films coming to us felt fresh, new, exciting, like he had found a second wind, although at his age, it would be like a third or fourth wind. Wild Grass, in 2009, was an Event, a re-assertion of his position, a playful and beautiful film showing that Resnais had not lost any power in his directing over all the years. It felt like a film made by a young and energetic man, although it also had the nostalgia and wisdom of the elderly – such a captivating mix. If you haven’t seen it, I urge you to! I fell in love with Wild Grass‘ dreamy quality, its fantastical emotionalism, its performances, its beautiful startling imagery. Age revitalized Resnais, age energized him. This sometimes happens with directors, although rarely. There are those rare birds who have a fruitful and revolutionary “final period”. His early films announced him as a major talent. Night and Fog. Hiroshima Mon Amour. Last Year at Marienbad (I love the moment in Manhattan Murder Mystery, when Woody Allen and Diane Keaton’s married couple characters reminisce about their first date, going to see Last Year at Marienbad, and Keaton remembers Allen being confused by it, and Allen says, defensively, “Who knew they were flashbacks?”)

Resnais was 91 years old when he passed, and he had just completed a new film, Life of Riley, which played at this year’s Berlinale.

I have not seen all of Resnais’ films (there are 50 of them, I get overwhelmed!), but he helped create the cinematic landscape in which we live. I have not seen Je T’Aime Je T’Aime (I missed it during its run last month at the Film Forum, dammit), and the recent review by Manohla Dargis in the Times is gorgeous and has become an inadvertent elegy.

In “Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime,” Claude’s journeys into the past resemble nothing less than memory — fragmented, inconstant, taunting, joyous and heartbreaking. We are, the movie reminds us, what we remember, with a consciousness built from reminiscences that flicker, fade and repeat, flicker, fade and repeat. It’s no wonder that movies enthrall us! Cinema is a time machine, and, as he has long proved, from “Last Year at Marienbad” to “Muriel” and beyond, Mr. Resnais is its ultimate time traveler.

Noel Murray at The Dissolve has a wonderful elegy up as well. Murray writes:

Resnais died this past Saturday night in Paris, at the age of 91, and even if his career had ended with Last Year At Marienbad, he’d still be mourned as one of the most important and influential directors who ever lived. But his loss stings all the more because Resnais never coasted on his early success. Over the past decade he’s made some of his most vital films, including 2009’s strange and wonderful love story Wild Grass, about aging iconoclasts who find themselves inconveniently drawn together through the contrivance of fiction, and 2012’s You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, about aging actors who hijack the performance of a play. Resnais had also recently completed the film Life Of Riley, which premiered at the Berlin film festival a few weeks ago. He remained an active and engaged artist, outlasting most of those younger directors who’d transformed cinema along with him.

Rest in peace.