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 Azéma, 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment