Je t'aime, je t'aime

JE T'AIME, JE T'AIME   ***

Alain Resnais

1968

IDEA:  Chosen as a guinea pig for a group of scientists' experiment in time travel, a suicidal man finds himself stuck reliving moments from his troubled past relationship with his girlfriend.

BLURB:  In ways familiar from Resnais' first three feature films, Je t’aime, je t’aime attempts to translate into cinematic language the fragmentary, non-hierarchical, and elusive structure of memory. The extent to which it accomplishes this can be considered as subjective as memory itself, contingent on the degree of the spectator’s receptivity to Resnais’ willfully alienating formal trickery. Of course, the film is not channeling a typical experience of remembering but one that is literally mediated through technology. This separates Je t’aime, je t’aime from the more purely metaphorical Last Year at Marienbad or Muriel, as its spatiotemporal dislocations have a diegetic explanation rooted in the classic science-fiction device of time travel. This changes the texture and meaning of the film’s nonlinearity; as well as conveying the generalized discombobulation and rumination of a tortured psyche, it signifies an experience of time fractured by capitalist labor and modern technological innovations. Ironically, Claude’s aleatory travels answer his plea for an escape from his unchanging workaday routine, just as they further trap him in a subjectivity as intractable as time - when its social and cinematic conventions are removed - is not. Although it can come off like the stuff of airless intellectual exercise, Resnais' deformation of narrative still appears radical all these years later, when achronological storytelling is so often something to be solved rather than intuited.