The playwright, Antoine d'Anthac, is fictional, the creation of real-life French playwright Jean Anouilh in the play Cher Antoine ou l'amour rate, which director / co-screenwriter Alain Resnais drafts to stand in for Anouilh as the author of his play Eurydice. The actors are real - among them Mathieu Amalric, Pierre Arditi, Sabine Azéma, Anne Consigny, Hippolyte Girardot, Michel Piccoli, and Lambert Wilson - playing fictionalized versions of themselves. In this incarnation, they have all appeared in productions of Eurydice on the Paris stage and have been invited to the playwright's country mansion for his wake, which in this case is a posthumous request to watch a fresh interpretation performed by a young company to judge whether they are worthy of staging a new production.
You could call it a film within a play, or a play within a film, but neither really captures the Russian nesting doll quality of the deft merging and doubling of the two arts. I see it as living theater meeting the cinematic imagination of Alain Resnais, who wraps Anouilh's two plays around one another for a new creation. This esteemed audience of France's great actors settle into the villa's grand but cozy home theater and watch this scruffy, stripped down production of Eurydice, projected from a video recording of a workshop production performed in rehearsal dress with minimal sets and props, and like them we are transported into the world they have created. Anouilh's play brings the two lovers of the great Greek tale into 1930s France. They fall in love at first sight and run away together, but her past and his jealousy catch up with them both with tragic results.
It's reminiscent of Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street, watching both a production and the reactions of this Greek chorus of spectators. And then the barriers between performance and audience dissolve. No, dissolve is the wrong word. Maybe "woven together in an increasingly complicated pattern" phrases it better. The actors arrive with an easy formality, happy to see one another even in the sad circumstances, and watch the production with measured curiosity, but where we are swept into the story onscreen, they drift back into their interpretations of the roles, first echoing the lines of dialogue from their seats like a wistful reminiscence of their own connection to the play, then turning to their respective co-stars to re-enact their roles, and finally taking off in parallel productions. Yes, the casts of two productions are in the audience and we soon are soon bouncing between three different interpretations of the play.
As the audience of veteran actors take up the play, the screening room gives way to CGI backdrops that Resnais purposely leaves artificial, as if projections of the actors committed to the drama or spectators lost in the spell of theater. But then the entire production has the projection of artifice to it. Even as the actors arrive at the country manor, ushered in by a loyal butler ostensibly fulfilling his final act in the old mansion, the door opens to an abstracted suggestion of the outdoors created from flats and lights and theatrical gels, a stage illusion that reminds us that, like all the world, this is simply another stage.
Resnais crosscuts between performances and performers, creates split screens to compare separate versions, and at one point quarters the screen into four images. Yet the technique never overwhelms the performances. Rather, it sets each production within its own sensibility, none of them "realistic" yet all of them rooted in the reality of the actor.
It's a joy to see the young company, all age-appropriate to their respective roles, pull us into the drama of the play's characters and lives by virtue of commitment. It's a revelation to see sixty-something veterans Pierre Arditi and Sabine Azéma (a longtime Resnais muse and collaborator) channel the essence of youth and impulse through performance alone and transform themselves into twenty-something lovers as passionate about life as they are about one another. Resnais finds no conflict or irony in the contrast of performer and role and nothing nostalgic is the exercise. Rather, he shows us how those seeming contradictions become unimportant in the magic of the moment. Where the lovers of the young cast have the glow of youth and impulse and roil with the anxiety of emotional conflict that turns every moment of their inexperience into a grand struggle, the elders give the lovers a wistful sense of the tragic, as if eternally fated to make the same mistakes.
Since he first made his international reputation with Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Resnais has loved to experiment with narrative, weaving memory and imagination into storytelling as if to insist that perception and recollection are just as important to the immediate experience. Five decades later, You Ain't Seen Nothing' Yet isn't so much revolutionary as it is another imaginative variation on his favorite themes, this one both reflective and ebullient. He presents the act of artistic transformation and interpretation as an energizing force: theater as a life all its own. What a magnificently cinematic celebration of the transformative magic of theater and performance and a reminder that sometimes the old dogs have the most fresh approaches to modern storytelling. At age 91, Alain Resnais is as vital as ever, with the reflective wisdom of an old lion and the creative energy of an eternally young artist.
On DVD only, in French with English subtitles and no supplements beyond the trailer.
By Sean Axmaker
