L'Homme qui ment (1968)
Directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet

Film Review

The difficulty of constructing a fictional narrative for a film provided writer-director Alain Robbe-Grillet with the subject for his most celebrated feature, Trans-Europ-Express (1966).  In his next film, L'Homme qui ment (a.k.a. The Man Who Lies) the even more fraught challenge of recounting real, lived experiences is tackled with even bolder cinematic bravura, the result being one of the most baffling yet mesmerising films of the Nouvelle Vague era in French cinema.  With its hauntingly surreal dreamlike structure, in which our commonplace notions of time and space are totally disregarded, along with just about every aspect of narrative logic, the film would seem to be a perfect companion-piece to Alain Renais's earlier L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), for which Robbe-Grillet had written the screenplay.  In fact, thematically, L'Homme qui ment has more in common with Renais's previous film, Hiroshima mon amour (1959), in which the ambiguous relationship between the West and East in the aftermath of WWII is powerfully represented by a romantic allegory, in the form of a fleeting liaison between a French woman and a Japanese man who cannot agree on their recollection of the past.

That the two Alains (Renais and Robbe-Grillet) have a common fascination with the interplay of time and memory is apparent in their early film work.  In both Hiroshima mon amour and L'Homme qui ment it is the events of the Second World War and their lasting consequences that preoccupy the two authors, who appear to share the same conclusion that there can never be a full shared understanding of what has taken place.  'You have never seen Hiroshima', the heroine of Resnais's film is told by her eastern lover.  By the same token, the exploits of the Resistance fighter Jean Robin (a.k.a. Boris Varissa, a.k.a. The Ukrainian) in Robbe-Grillet's film will never be fully understood, not even by himself.  This isn't because the narrator is inherently deceitful (the film's title is misleading in this respect), but rather because it is simply impossible for one person to come up with an unequivocally objective account of his experiences.  Whatever story we tell about ourselves is bound to be constrained by our limited point-of-view, our imperfect vocabulary and our motives for telling the story in the first place (which of course depends on whom we are telling the story to).  All histories are, by their very nature, fictional constructs, personal histories even more so.

By the time he made this, his third feature, Alain Robbe-Grillet was firmly established as one of France's leading literary figures, one of the creators of the so-called Nouveau Roman.  His interest in the inordinate complexities of the human mind, revealed through a deliriously fragmentary form of artistic expression, is central to his oeuvre, and it is in L'Homme qui ment that he gives us his most cinematographically potent reformulation of his literary work.  In the second (and arguably finest) of his four collaborations with the director, Jean-Louis Trintignant plays the titular lying man who, apparently afflicted with a severe case of split identity, struggles to formulate a coherent narrative of his life from a perplexing barrage of conflicting memories that fail to come together.  (It is worth mentioning, en passant, that the actor's father was himself a prominent member of the French Resistance at the time of the Nazi Occupation.)  This was the first in a string of extraordinary performances that established Trintignant as one of France's greatest screen actors, and he was duly honoured with the Best Actor award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1968.  Bewildering as the film is, it is Trintignant's utterly compelling presence that forces us to keep watching and indulge Robbe-Grillet in his wildest flight of creative fancy.

L'Homme qui ment was filmed in the east of Czechoslovakia at the very start of the Prague Spring early in 1968.  This choice of location proved to be fortuitous as it somehow endows the entire film with an eerie aura of oppression and timelessness - a sense of a placid world suspended between two horrors - the experienced traumas of the past and the anticipated traumas yet to come.  The film's most unsettling aspect is the ease with which it instils in the spectator the impression that he or she is genuinely experiencing a dream rather than merely watching a piece of cinema.  The illusion is convincingly achieved by some unlikely juxtapositions (such as a man in a modern suit being pursued through a forest by WWII German soldiers) and jarring sudden shifts across time and space whilst maintaining a continuity of action.  Through a combination of inspired camerawork and meticulous editing the film plunges the audience into a dazzling dream-world from which no aficionado of Resnais's Marienbad phantasmagoria would ever want to be released.

Trintignant's arrival in a rural town at the start of the film is intercut with fleeting shots of nymph-like women playing blind-man's buff in a rundown château.  The reason for these erotic inserts is hard to fathom at first but things become clearer towards the end of the film, when the protagonist's darkly libidinous nature is revealed. Trintignant starts by introducing himself as Jean Robin, and a few breaths later he says his real name is Boris Varissa, known to some as The Ukrainian.  Jean, it seems, is his closest friend, and a hero of the Resistance according to the locals.  But in telling his story to each of the three women he meets in the château (Jean's wife, sister and servant girl) and a girl in an inn he comes up with four contradictory accounts, painting himself first as a devoted friend of Jean, then as a man who selfishly betrayed him for the least noble of reasons.

Jean and Boris are both violently killed several times in the course of the events depicted on screen, and in one scene Trintignant carefully positions himself in front of a cross above a grave bearing Boris's name.  In the film's totally insane denouement, Boris gets to his feet after being shot dead by Jean and is instantly transformed into Jean (changing his appearance whilst retaining his own voice).  The resurrected man identifies himself as Boris (Jean being his adopted name) and then we see Trintignant (the original Boris) being driven out of the château into the woods, taking us back to where we started with the image of a man in modern dress being hunted by armed soldiers from a quarter of a century before.  Bunuel's surrealist binge L'Âge d'or is a cinch to unravel compared with this.

By the end of the film the one thing we can be sure of is that Boris and Jean are one in the same man - two facets of the same individual who cannot (for reasons that remain obscure) reconcile himself to this fact.  During the Occupation, it was commonplace that members of the Resistance would adopt an alias, and so Boris is likely to be Jean's nom de guerre.  This may have led Jean to develop a split identity in the course of his Resistance activities, with the result that he sees himself as two completely different people.  The fact that the three women in the château - indeed everyone in the town - appears to regard Jean as a complete stranger when he returns after the war would suggest that what we are seeing is not reality, but rather a deranged fantasy playing out in Jean's head as he struggles - in vain - to construct a coherent identity for himself.  The degree to which he has become a fractured being, incapable of piecing his world together, is shown by the obvious inconsistencies in his stories - how can he both a blameless hero of the Resistance and a cynically motivated traitor?   Like the unfortunate protagonist in Kafka's two great novels, Boris/Jean is a man without an identity, imprisoned in an unending nightmare of his own creation through his inability to rationalise the irrational, his own contradictory nature.

Film Synopsis

A well-dressed man in his early thirties is running through a dense wood, pursued by armed soldiers.  It isn't long before the soldiers catch up with their prey and shoot him down.  Moments later, the hunted man gets to his feet, seemingly unharmed.  His pursuers have gone away.  As he proceeds on foot, the man tells us his name - Jean Robin - and begins to recount his story.  He loses his way and starts again.  His real name is Boris Varissa - some of his acquaintances call him Jean, others call him The Ukrainian.  Jean Robin is his closest friend, his comrade in arms during the war.  Leaving the wood, the stranger reaches an area of open countryside and is soon walking through a seemingly deserted rural town.  He enters a busy pub and receives suspicious glances from the locals seated around him.  They are talking about Jean Robin, a hero of the Resistance who hasn't been seen for two, maybe three years.  Some are sure he is dead, others believe he will one day make a return.

Meanwhile, Jean's beautiful young wife Laura lives in seclusion at his family château, in the company of his sister Sylvia and servant girl Maria.  Laura has a reputation as a corrupter of young women and, in Jean's absence, she spends her days acting out erotic fantasies with her two female companions.  When the stranger arrives at the château it appears deserted - until he finds the three women together in one room.  He introduces himself as Boris Varissa, a friend of Jean.  It was during the war that Boris saved Jean's life after sustaining a gunshot wound.  When Jean was arrested and placed in captivity, Boris organised his rescue - it was the least he could do to save the life of such an important member of the Resistance.

When he next recounts the story, the stranger reveals that, overcome with fear, Jean was driven to betray his Resistance allies when they came to his aid.  In the third telling of the story, Boris admits to betraying Jean and, having done so, accepted the fate of a traitor - summary execution.  The motive for Boris's betrayal of his friend is finally revealed to be his overwhelming desire to steal his wife.  When Laura resists Boris's attempt at seduction, Jean suddenly shows up and shoots him dead.  The dead man rises to his feet and is transformed into Jean, who identifies himself as Boris Varissa.  In the latter's account of the time he returned to the château just after the war, we see the original Boris being driven away by an unseen enemy - into the very same woods wherein the series of events we have witnessed began...