La Vie est un roman (1983) - film review

On the eve of the First World War, a wealthy count, Forbek, builds a rocco pleasure dome in the French countryside.  He invites his wife and his friends to live a life of idyllic seclusion inside the dome.  In 1982, the same dome is the venue for a teaching seminar attended by a number of teachers with some radical ideas for educating children.  Both Forbek and the seminar’s organisers are striving for similar things, the creation of a better world.  Both are doomed to failure…

The relationship between times past and present is a recurrent theme in Alain Resnais’ cinema.  Whereas his earlier films adopt an abstract, often bewildering, approach, his later films, and La Vie est un roman is a prime example of this, opt for the more direct path.  In this particular film, past and present are represented by two completely separate story strands.  Yet they overlap and have so much in common (the location, the quest for Utopia) that we feel we are watching the same story from two different perspectives.  There is also a third story, less developed, involving some medieval dungeons and dragons type characters – utterly perplexing but strangely adding to the structure of the film.

Such a film could only be possible if it were created by a great director who had the services of an equally talented photography director.  This film has both, and that is quite evident from the first five minutes of the film.  Nuttyen’s camera work is not just impressive – it is sumptuous and captivating.  It is often remarked that one of the distinguishing features of Resnais’ films is that the audience is spellbound from start to finish – once their attention has been grabbed, it isn’t released until the “Fin” caption comes up. Whilst La Vie est un roman is not in the league of some of Resnais’ earlier works, such as L’Année dernière à Marienbad , it is nonetheless a stunningly filmed piece of cinema.

The presence of such a strong cast is almost incidental, but the film is certainly enhanced by such actors as Ruggero Raimondi as the dangerously obsessed Count Forbek and Fanny Ardant as his cheating wife.  The final scenes between these two actors are so charged that you feel anything could happen – and it does.

The icing on the cake has to be the eerie music which accompanies the film from start to finish.  It is really very unsettling to have such music, which would seem to have been composed for a gory thriller, being played against scenes which appear mildly comic.  Resnais seems to be reminding us that beneath the surface there lurks something quite unpleasant.   The message is reinforced by the constant jaunts from 1982 back to the 1910s, in a strange and disturbing mélange of light comedy with gothic horror.  The errors of the past manage to create a resonance in the present – a typically Resnais-esque notion of time and memory.

© James Travers 2001

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