|
Storytelling is a nice way of passing the time while taking the train, as Buñuel would subsequently confirm, Alain Robbe-Grillet with his producer and secretary aboard the Paris-Antwerp express brainstorm a thriller, sort of. "Something exciting, with fights, violence, rape, you know." Cocaine trafficking in false-bottom suitcases, diamonds are another potential MacGuffin, never mind, too complicated. Jean-Louis Trintignant wanders by the passenger car, why not him as the star? The dame sitting across from him, rival spy or undercover gendarme? Aha, kleptomaniac. (Graham's Marnie is renamed Transes, the hollowed-out tome conceals a pistol.) Surveillance bleeds into dreams, rough fantasies are made flesh by the pert streetwalker (Marie-France Pisier). "Those true stories are always boring." Having the advantage of recognizing the genius of Chuck Jones' Duck Amuck, Robbe-Grillet hops puckishly between planes of reality and fiction in this cubistic welter of puns and kinks. A drug mule's test run in the meta-netherworld, where "Abbé Petitjean" is uttered like "Godot" or "Mabuse." The protag has plenty of choices at the newsstand, chained pin-ups versus "The Man Who Died Four Times" on a magazine cover, he settles on a comic-book. La Traviata shards side by side with clanging freighters, glass partitions in train compartments like nothing so much as carnival mirror mazes. "What shall we do with the other scene?" "Take it out." Hotel Miro, Chez Samson, Cabaret Eve... "Pourquoi tout cette mise en scène," asks the exasperated hero, answered by the auteur at the very end as a man who's just been shot and a woman who's just been strangled are revived to notice the camera mid-embrace—the kind of moment that simultaneously epitomizes and transcends fragmented artifice. With Christian Barbier, Henri Lambert, Charles Millot, Gérard Palaprat, Nadine Verdier, Prima Symphony, Daniel Emilfork, Paul Louyet, and Catherine Robbe-Grillet. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |