Capital Celluloid 2012 - Day 294: Sun Oct 21

You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet (Resnais, 2012): Cine Lumiere, 4pm
This film is also being screened on October 17 at BFI Southbank at 6.30pm. Details here.

Denying that the film should be seen as a testament, director Alain Resnais said at a press conference in Cannes, "This film is unlike any other. If I'd thought of this film as a final statement, I'd never have had the courage or energy to do it."

I saw the film on Tuesday at a press screening and truly, you ain't seen nothing like this. Resnais continues, at the age of 90, to produce extraordinary work.

56th LONDON FILM FESTIVAL (10-21 October 2012) DAY 12

Every day (from October 10 to October 21) I will be selecting the London Film Festival choices you have a chance to get tickets for and the movies you are unlikely to see in London very soon unless you go to see them at the Festival. Here is the LFF's main website for the general information you need. Don't worry if some of the recommended films are sold out by the time you read this as there are always some tickets on offer which go on sale 30 minutes before each screening. Here is the information you need to get those standby tickets.


Time Out review:
'Alain Resnais seems untouched by age, at least as far as his films are concerned. ‘Wild Grass’, his last film, was arguably more audacious, lighter and more evocative of the carefree spirit of youth than the work of many younger directors, and this latest is no less adventurous, notwithstanding its subject matter.

Because, to borrow a pun from an earlier Resnais title, the twin concerns of his formally inventive adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s ‘Eurydice’ are ‘amouret la mort’: love and death. But if the director has any anxieties about what lies beyond the grave, he certainly isn’t revealing them. Playful,witty, as unashamedly theatrical as it is cinematic, the movie begins with a fabulous array of French actors – ­ Sabine AzĂ©ma, Pierre Arditi, Michel Piccoli, Lambert Wilson, Anne Consigny, Mathieu Amalric and Hippolyte Girardot are probably the best known internationally –­ playingthemselves and being summoned by phone to the home of a recently deceased old playwright friend. There they are shown a video of drama students rehearsing the dead writer’ retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice ­ and as the actors, who have all themselves acted in the play at some point in their lives, watch the video, they start first to repeat the remembered lines, then to act out the parts with the other spectators, then to interact with the performers on screen. Then the house they are in becomes an ever-changing set.

There’s far more to it, of course; the movie isn’t just some shallow piece of clever formal flapdoodle. Like most of Resnais’s work, it concerns the constant, complex interplay between ‘reality’, memory, imagination and desire. Thanks to the choice of material, death also looms large, ­though not at all threateningly; the ghosts here are simply the feelings we have experienced. The film is touching, but more than that it’s wise, witty and thought-provoking.'
Geoff Andrew


Here is the trailer.

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