Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968)
Directed by Alain Resnais

Film Review

Alain Resnais's Je t'aime, je t'aime is, to cinema, pretty well what Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu is to the novel - an ambitiously innovative attempt to explore the interrelationship between memory and experience within the confines of a popular medium of expression.  Both are challenging works of art, but they take us into territory that is essential for a deeper understanding of human experience and the nature of reality.  Throughout much of his career, and certainly his early work, Resnais has shown an almost compulsive fascination with memory, that remarkable facility of the human brain which gives us an awareness of identity and our passage through time.  Without memory, life would be reduced to a single point of consciousness - we would exist only in the present moment.  In Je t'aime, je t'aime, Resnais takes us on the weirdest journey yet and reminds us of the importance of memory and its role in shaping our lives.

The plot is lifted almost entirely from La Jetée (1962), a short film made by an avant-garde contemporary of Resnais, Chris Marker.  A supposed experiment in time travel (involving a cerebellum-shaped time machine) is the pretext for a man's journey back into his own past to relive a precious moment of his life.  Naturally, the experiment goes horribly awry and our hero becomes trapped in a perpetual time loop, continually re-experiencing fragments of his past life in a chaotically non-chronological sequence.  Gradually, the protagonist's life story begins to take shape and what first seem to be random recollections ultimately gel into a coherent, intensely poignant narrative, the story of a man haunted by a doomed romance that led him to murder and an attempted suicide.

The fact that the film lacks an objective external viewpoint makes it impossible to decide whether reality has any bearing on the plot.  The whole thing might be just a dream.  It might equally be the fabrication of a dying brain - a terrifying concept if you think about it.  Or it could be that the hero genuinely has been subjected to a botched time travel experiment (along with a cute little mouse).  As in many of Resnais's films, the boundary between  reality and imagination is virtually impossible to discern - as it often is in real life.  It is worth remembering that what we think of as reality is no more than an imperfect mathematical model created by our brains - an artificial construct from the same machine that manufactures our dreams.  How can we be sure that anything is real?  In a sense, everything we are aware of is a dream.

Je t'aime, je t'aime has strong echoes of Resnais's earlier masterpiece L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), a film which employs a similar fragmented narrative structure but with a far more recognisably dreamlike feel to it.  The similarity of these two films is striking, and each exerts a powerful hold over the spectator in spite of their radical departure from the conventional narrative form.  Just as Marienbad was once dismissed as pretentious nonsense by some critics, so Je t'aime was misunderstood and ill-received on its first release in the eventful year of 1968.  A commercial failure it may have been, but Je t'aime, je t'aime is a remarkable piece of cinematic art, assuredly one of Alain Resnais's most inspired and haunting films.  Sometimes it is good to be reminded of the importance of memory - that miracle of nature by which we are permitted to traverse the fourth dimension and be aware of the fact.  Without memory, time would cease to exist and life would be totally meaningless.

Film Synopsis

Leaving hospital after a failed suicide attempt, Claude Ridder is accosted by two strangers, who make him a bizarre proposal.  They invite him to participate in an experiment which could change the course of human history.  With nothing better to do and having nothing to lose, Claude allows the strangers to drive him to a secret research laboratory, which is disguised as a centre for agronomical research.  Here, the scientists tell Claude that they intend to allow him to relive one minute of his past, exactly one year ago...