Vous n'avez encore rien vu (2012)
Directed by Alain Resnais

Film Review

The complex relationships between art and life, life and death, past and present are the substance of Alain Resnais's latest film, a boldly experimental work which somehow manages to be the best career résumé anyone could have come up with for the 89 year old filmmaker. Vous n'avez encore rien vu (a.k.a. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet) owes its title to an engimatic line in Resnais's debut feature Hiroshima, mon amour (1959): "Tu n'as rien vu à Hiroshima..." and is presumably intended in a darkly ironic vein, the joke being that everything we have yet to see has already been seen: the future is the perfect mirror of the past, and vice versa.  By having several different individuals effectively playing the same character, and uttering the same lines, Resnais reminds us that there are only a small number of stories, which humanity is condemned to play out over and over again, like actors performing the same play, ad infinitum.  Time is the ultimate plagiarist.

Anyone familiar with Alain Resnais's oeuvre will see another irony in the title, since the film revisits themes which the director has already explored many times in his previous work, in particular the crucial interdependency between time and memory, without which life would be totally meaningless and indistinguishable from death.  It could be argued that we live not an objective present reality (whatever that might be) but in a dreamlike construction housed in our flawed memory, in which past, present and future are conflated into a murky zone of timeless consciousness.  This is the notion conveyed by Resnais's most inspired film, L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), cinema's most successful attempt to take us on a tour of the inner dreamworld in which we live our lives.  It is also one that is felt in much of his subsequent work, which employs artifice and heavy stylisation (often to absurd extremes) to vanquish cinema's cold objectivity and reveal the deeper truths of existence lying beneath the bland carapace of supposed normality.

In Vous n'avez encore rien vu, Resnais takes stylisation to a whole new level by eroding the boundary between real life and its theatrical reflection to the point that ultimately they become the same thing.  The actors who are gathered together by a recently deceased playwright to watch and pass judgement on a performance of his work by a young theatre company are emotionally impelled to re-enact what they have seen, resurrecting characters they have previously performed on stage.  It is as if time has been set in abeyance, if not abolished altogether.  Through their remembered experiences, the actors not only make contact with their past selves (crossing the boundary between realities just as the hero of Jean Cocteau's film Orphée manages to pass through the mirror that separates life and death), they become their past selves.  They achieve this by acting out the lives of characters in a play written in the 1940s, which was inspired by an ancient Greek legend.  This is essentially all we are - marionettes acting out the same play over and over again, without realising it and not caring much if we did.

The film ingeniously works together two plays by the acclaimed French dramatist Jean Anouilh: Eurydice and Cher Antoine ou l'amour raté.  Eurydice is Anouilh's best known work, a modern reinterpretation of the Greek story of Orpheus and Eurydice, written and first performed during the Nazi occupation of France.   It is the story of an artist whose love is stolen from him by death, but restored to life on condition that he does not look upon her face.  Resurrection through memory and love is essentially what the film is about: the dead writer seeks to live again, through a modern production of his play; the over-the-hill actors whom he assembles to bring this about likewise find themselves reborn as they watch the play and undergo an intense, life-restoring nostalgia trip.  As in the original Greek legend, it is a resurrection with strings attached.  We can never fully relive the past - our subsequent experiences will always distort, if not completely re-write, what we remember.  Like Orpheus, we are condemned never to see again the thing we once loved; if we did, we would surely lose it forever.  Instead, we must look at it through a mirror, the mirror that is our memory.

Whilst the film shows tremendous imaginative flair and is technically a fine achievement, it does feel far more like a self-conscious cerebral exercise in stylisation for its own sake than a genuine attempt to engage with an audience at a deep psychological level.  Lacking the astonishing artistic coherence of Les Herbes folles (2009) and emotional impact of Coeurs (2006), Resnais's two most recent films, Vous n'avez encore rien vu has a colder, more mechanical feel to it, in spite of the abundance of acting talent that it throws at us (most filmmakers would sell their soul a hundred times over to have the cast that Resnais assembles here).  The film retreads ground that the director has already ploughed over at least a dozen times, but he does so in a way that complements rather than merely rehashes what has gone before.  There is a formal beauty to the film that makes it a treat for the eye and the intellect, its stylish art design subtly evoking the fatalist aura of Marcel Carné's poetic realist masterpieces of the 1930s, but, for all that, it doesn't engage with the heart with quite the same intensity.  However, the fact that Alain Resnais's cinema still continues to fascinate and enchant seems to reaffirm his tongue-in-cheek thesis: we haven't seen anything yet.  Either that or we all have extremely bad memories...

Film Synopsis

After his death, the famous playwright Antoine d'Anthac summons thirteen actors he once worked with to his large house for a special mission.  They must watch a recorded performance of his play Eurydice by a young theatre company and decide whether it is fit to be staged.  As they sit and watch the play in a critical frame of mind, each of the thirteen actors is reminded of his or her own past performance.  The barrier between life and art is suddenly less clear-cut than they might suppose...