Alain Robbe-Grillet has passed away. Or has he? Given the fluid nature of reality in
his books and films, the permeability of all times with eternity, the
interconnection of every consciousness and fate with one each other and with
none in particular, he may just have moved on to another scene or narrative
line or another movie. Like the resistance hero played by Jean Louis
Trintingnant in his 1968 film “The Man Who Lied,” who gets gunned down by the
Nazis at the beginning of the film but
rises from the dead to tell at least two separate and contradictory stories of
his life. Or the incubus-like phantom lover of “La Belle Captive (1983),” who
comes and goes and might be just a figment of the imagination of the film’s
secret agent protagonist. “I'll find you if I need to,” she tells him
unhelpfully. “Maybe tonight. Maybe never. Or ![]()
maybe yesterday. Time doesn't
exist for me.”
Assuming, however, that time does exist for the rest of us, and that for Robbe-Grillet, at least, it has run out, what will he be remembered for? Perhaps
his revolutionary literary efforts, as announced in his manifesto “For a New
Novel" (1963), in which he declared that literature that indulged in the
illusion of psycholgical depth and non-literal meaning was obsolete, that
instead fiction could only engage with surfaces described and redescribed with
obsessive scrupulousness and from every angle. This theory was embodied in
novels such as “The Erasers”(1953) and “Jealousy” (1957) which included pages of descriptions detailing tomato seeds
and banana plants (he was, after all, originally an agronomist).
So maybe the New Novel itself is a little passé. How about the
New Wave? It only made sense that an artist preoccupied with surfaces might
flourish in a medium that was utterly two dimensional and illusory. “Last Year
at Marienbad” (1961; playing at Brattle Theatre February 29 to March 6), which he wrote and Alain Resnais directed, became,
especially for those who never saw it, a
synonym for all that was enigmatic, pretentious and opaque in foreign cinema.
It’s also pretty funny, and absurdist humor might be the key to that
and Robbe-Grillet’s subsequent films. “La Belle Captive,”
in particular, draws
on the unnerving hilarity of surrealists such as Rene Magritte, painter of the
nightmarish canvas the movie is named after. It also is visually stunning, diabolically cryptic and filled with beautiful
naked people.
He’d make only two other films in the 25 years after “La Belle
Captive.” I saw “The Blue Villa” (1995)
at a film festival somewhere and I don’t remember much about it except for flashes
of absurd humor, diabolical crypticness and naked people (jet lag, I suppose).
“Gradiva” (2006) never made it to America. It’s another tale of an
elusive, perhaps imaginary, definitely unattainable and frequently naked (and
whipped and tied up ) beauty, and the French were frankly getting tired of it.
You can get a sense of the film and the octogenarian filmmaker in this
interview done in the “Guardian” after the film opened in Britain. As you
might imagine, Robbe-Grillet is quite a handful -- enigmatic, pretentious,
opaque, with a weak 
bladder and mad as a hatter (sample quotes: “Similarly, lots of my books feature
13-year-old girls getting fucked. That doesn't mean I have done so… But if you
are asking me if I have chained a slave to a bed in a room in Marrakech, I
would say your question is ridiculous." And: "I have to pee.")
So, now he is gone. Or perhaps not. Some of his antic spirit
lives on in directors such as P.T. and Wes Anderson, the Coen Brothers, Spike
Jonze, Richard Kelly and others. Like Marienbad, we haven’t seen the last of
him yet.
Latest Slideshows
