Mélo (1986)

Mélo is a French film first released in 1986, directed by Alain Resnais.  The film is based on a play by Henri Bernstein and stars Sabine Azéma, Fanny Ardant, Pierre Arditi, André Dussollier and Jacques Dacqmine.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Two old friends, Marcel and Pierre, get together one evening for a meal and to reminisce on old times.  Marcel is now a world famous virtuoso violinist whilst Pierre has settled down for a quiet life with his wife, Romaine.  From this first meeting, Romaine and Marcel fall madly in love and have an affair.  Their problem is what to do about Pierre...

Mélo makes a striking contrast with Alain Resnais’ previous films in which, by and large, narrative is either lacking altogether or else achieved in an astonishingly original way, often through some phenomenal photography and unconventional editing.

Mélo adopts the conventional linear narrative form, almost to its absolute limit, to the point of actually resembling a theatrical performance.  Resnais has taken a third rate 1920s melodrama and managed to create a remarkable piece of cinema - and he accomplishes this feat by apparently just shooting the film as a play.

Of course, Resnais being Resnais, things are not this simple.  Because the narrative is so simple and unchallenging, it is not too difficult to see the genius that lies behind Resnais’ film.  The question that you are forced to ask yourself is: why is such an ordinary story so enthralling.  The genius lies not in the plot or the dialogue but in its visual representation.  The photography is captivating, a feature that underpins much of Resnais’ cinema, and in this film it is the quality of the photography - under Resnais’ masterful direction – that is the film’s main strength.

Resnais is well served by his three lead actors (four if the include the impeccable Fanny Ardant), although you feel that the director could have fared almost as well with a cast of less talented actors.  Indeed, it would have been an interesting experiment to see how well the film would have stood up with some less capable actors – although that was probably one risk Resnais was not prepared to take.

This is an astonishingly simple film, shot in a very small number of scenes, with little in the way of plot development.  (The film itself was shot in just 20 days, with few re-takes.)   However, remarkably, the film does not drag and does not feel over-long (even though it is almost two hours in length).   Once again, Resnais has caused us to question our assumptions about what constitutes great cinema.

© James Travers 2001

A brief summary of this film’s plot could easily render it unadventurously predictable.  And yet, such is the idiosyncratic subtlety of Alain Resnais’s directorial magic that the film is shocking.  It is as though, before this film, no one had ever attempted to tell a story about adultery.  In particular, there is a scene near the end where one of the characters performs a series of somersaults that is one of the two or three most startling scenes it has been the good fortune of this viewer to have seen.

© Ira L. Gordon (Richfield, Minnesota, USA) 2008

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Personal love and professional dedication to art support one another in this sophisticated tale about what artistic intellectuals were occupied with during a historical period when European totalitarianism in various countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc.) was forming.  Personal love becomes intensified not only by being a part of human soul’s artistic yearning but also by the ability of the characters for advanced self-reflection and for creating their own subjective narratives about love and art.  Psychological control over love relationships through love narrative (a sublimated version of love towards a love object) becomes a part of human destiny in love, in art and in understanding of the world.  For further analyses of films by Godard, Bergman, Kurosawa, Fassbinder, Bertolucci, Resnais, Pasolini, Cavani and Bunuel, visit: www.actingoutpolitics.com
Victor (Seattle, USA)

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