L'Amour à mort (1984)
Directed by Alain Resnais

Film Review

Death is a recurrent theme in the oeuvre of Alain Resnais.  Its alluring presence is keenly felt in his early masterpieces - Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) - curiously linking up with the director's other preoccupations of time and memory.  It underpins two of his other great works - Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968) and Providence (1977) - and subsequently becomes a troubling undercurrent to much of his later work.  L'Amour à mort is the film in which the director confronts the topic most directly, exploring the intimate and profound connection (as many other artists have done before him) between the two defining aspects of human existence - love and death.

For his most experimental - and baffling - film of the 1980s, Resnais departs from the formal theatricality that characterises his middle period and embraces a more radical cinematic style which punctuates intense slices of life with weird projections into the void, with light spots flashing on a black background accompanied by voiceover dialogue and discordant music.  The impression is that of a human mind gradually succumbing to the force of death, the soul detaching itself from earthly reflections as the void closes in and consumes it.

Watching L'Amour à mort is an extremely unsettling experience, re-watching it again afterwards even more so, and unlike Resnais's other cinematic offerings, there seems to be precious little to console us.  This is one where we have to work things out for ourselves; there is no one to hold our hand and guide us.  Could this be the reason why the film remains one of the more obscure and underrated entries in the director's remarkable filmography?

The presence of Resnais's immaculate quartet of Pierre Arditi, Sabine Azéma, André Dussollier and Fanny Ardant - previously seen together in the poetic fantasy La Vie est un roman (1983) - gives the film a false impression of familiarity and therefore accessibility.  These are four actors that we can instantly engage with.  Azéma's distress at losing not only Arditi in his physical form but also the welter of love that binds them together is something we can immediately relate to.  At the same time, we share Dussollier and Ardant's inability to comprehend the full extent of Azéma's crushing passion, which, from their rational perspective, resembles the unhealthiest kind of morbid obsession.

Resnais could have, with the complicity of his four great actors, made this a more conventional chamber piece, in the Ingmar Bergman mould, but instead he skews it in a completely different direction and gives it a provokingly metaphysical slant.  L'Amour à mort convinces us that not only are death and love connected, they are almost certainly two aspects of the same underlying reality, the unfathomable void out of which conscious experience is born, and into which we must inevitably return all too soon.  Love not only prepares us for death, it is death, that ineffable truth that we struggle to understand and yet we know must bring us back into union with the whole of creation.

Our awareness of love as a tangible force in nature, not merely an illusory mental construct, is represented by Resnais as flecks of light in the infinite expanse of nothingness.  For wretched souls like Azéma and Simon's characters, who lack faith and see nothing but tragedy in a love lost to death, there is only darkness.  For those, like Dussollier and Ardant's characters, who do have faith and therefore have the imagination to see the essential correspondence between love and death, there is only light.  Reality must surely lie between these two extreme positions.  The light-dark duality is how we are naturally programmed to perceive the love-death dichotomy that shapes our lives; to see darknes alone or light alone is to deny the true nature of being.

L'Amour à mort is not a comfortable film to watch but it deserves to be considered one of Alain Resnais's most personal and profound films.  It eerily prefigures the last film he made before his own death, Aimer, boire et chanter (2014), and provides us with a deeper insight into much of his other work.  There is a haunting mystical poetry to this idiosyncratic film that, once it has taken root in your soul, never leaves you.

Film Synopsis

Whilst participating in an archaeological survey, Simon Roche, a man in his fifties, falls in love with Élisabeth Sutter, an attractive younger woman.  Succumbing to an intense mutual attraction, these two contrasting individuals share a few months of passionate love, which ends abruptly when Simon suffers a seizure and is proclaimed dead by his doctor.  Miraculously, Simon is revived but as he regains his senses it is evident that he has been profoundly altered by his near-death experience.

Élizabeth now lives in a state of constant anguish, fearful that she may lose Simon for good, but her lover is resolute in not having any medical examinations.  In desperation, Élizabeth seeks the support of two close friends, Judith and Jérôme Martignac, both pastors with a deep-seated religious conviction.. Blinded by their own personal beliefs, the Martignacs appear unable to comprehend Élizabeth's anxiety, nor can they fathom the nature of her all-consuming love for Simon...