Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime (1970)

Overrated

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

Resnais mixes it up again nicely in this time traveling chronicle of a tragic romance. Watching this movie is like dropping a plate from a great height, then trying to make sense of all the broken bits. Fragmented scenes create an arresting mosaic of memory shards, ordered by emotion. In the end, our hero (Claude Rich) finds himself trapped forever inside pieces of the past, just like us all.(I'm an enthusiast, not a critic. Thanks for reading.)

Je t'aime, je t'aime (Alain Resnais, 1968, 91')My last film review for amazon (uk and us) was Vilgot Sjöman's I am Curious (Yellow- Blue) (1967-1968, 122'-93') of 30/5/2013 for amazon uk. Today's is my first review again after a nearly five month break. I mainly used the time to further develop my publication of "bloc notes", a cultural record, containing amazon film reviews, film book reviews and revIews of some Malaysia Philharmonic Orchestra (mpo) performances. My new film series (ie No 251 onwards) will first review a series of films which have been neglected for a variety of reasons, mostly unavailability of minimum quality copies. The reviews here are also meant to complement some earlier country or author series. - Now the movie:>>>In this provocative sci-fi drama from Alain Resnais, a man wakes up in a hospital after an attempted suicide. He has invented a time machine that has proved effective, but only transports the subject back in time for one minute. Upon his release, he gets his hands on the machine to go back to a time he fondly remembers spending with a woman he apparently has feelings about. The two stroll on the beach before she leaves for Scotland. He follows her, but tragedy ensues and it is not clear if he has killed her or if she died an accidental death. The time-machine angle of the film features a dreamlike series of flashbacks making it unclear if the action is presently unfolding or is merely a vague memory from the past. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi/IMDb<<<The Wikipedia free encyclopedia Alain Resnais article gives much more material on Resnais' work, but tends to overvalue his achievements, This film was meant to be presented at Cannes 1968, but expecting from radio news the chaos which then ensued, Alain Resnais broke his train journey to Cannes at Lyons and turned back to Paris. The festival was cancelled, the film was lost for a festival presentation and hence never really made it into the commercially relevant distribution circuit. Accordingly, it was near-impossible to get hold of a copy - no DVD's then, and DVD's now, but not released until very recently (I waited four years for it), still highly priced. The film was not worth any of these efforts. A bit nouveau roman, a bit love and death philosophy, the whole in a very old fashioned, very petit-bourgeois Belgian university environment, late Victorian, science hocus-pocus, but catholic? Acting flat, Claude Rich his worst, so Olga Georges-Picot, the rest of actors (if that is the word) an amateurish bunch of no skills. Bad, useless, horrible. Perhaps Resnais' worst.251 - Je t'aime, je t'aime (Alain Resnais, 1968, 91') -A miss for the miss, and the boys as well – 29/10/2013

Ostensibly buried upon release under the avalanche of the '68 events, a time when the Parisian youths were more keen to plan for a radical future than lament a forlorn past (and perhaps as preparation spent their movietime away from the streets watching Week End or La Chinoise, films that rehearsed their efforts), in this Resnais film we find no eternal sunshines and no spotless minds. We find only memory, this destructive facet of consciousness grinding out its painful cycle of endless returns.I had anticipated a complex film, it's what fans of it insist, instead it's the most simple of Resnais' features I have seen. We see here a life rearranged out of time, a love affair, a death. We see how the lovers met, what idle or affectionate time they shared on the same bed, how they hoped or thought to communicate and know one another but probably didn't, the man's struggles to maintain the closeness in the relationship and his failure to do so. We see how they grew apart and broke up, and what happened of them.Resnais' touch is that we don't see any of this in that order, rather as convalescent images relived, as though there might not be pattern there. But once the novelty plays out, he doesn't take it far enough. He has to rely on montage for all this, and acquits himself rather well. When they break up, he doesn't follow the scene with something from older, happier times, the contrast would've been much too easy, instead he gives us an anonymous scene from a time inbetween where she's crying on his shoulder.It's a simple film only because it comes by the hand of Resnais. In retrospect he was perhaps unlucky to make Hiroshima mon Amour his debut. And as followup, the complete, perfect abstraction of it. What was left for him to go next?

This film's a landmark in french sci-fi. To be honest, french sci-fi can almost be summarized in 'La Jetée', 'Paris n'existe pas' (don't even try to find this one...) and 'Je t'aime, Je t'aime'. Watch the last to catch a glimpse of the process in which Resnais can create a powerful masterpiece out of nothing. The plot's rather simple; a neuropathed mood man (Claude Ridder) who tried to commit suicide is selected by a secret organisation in order to experiment a very dangerous and quite hopeless travel, a journey in his own past. If you ever experienced resnais' border lined cinema, you'll obviously understand that this movie will not use the same old usual vision of time travel, (basically 'where and when' HG Wells stuff ) Formally, try to see it as a sequel of emotional paintings of the hero's past life (more than 150 sequences from 2 seconds to 2 minutes, which may or may not have links between them), about the life which he and his accidentally past away wife Catrine tried to built in the late 60's in Paris. A forced introspection by the most violent and merciless way to revive key moments of his life (re-live them as they happen is the scientific purpose but why not re-live them mixed up with his subjectivity ? How great is the strengh of our past on the present when we have the opportunity to change it ? This film's also about weakness of memories in front of memory's complexity) brought by an organic space machine would of course make the travel more difficult than it is for his companion, an academical white mouse which allow itself to sneak into his past. Human perception of the so-called reality, our ability to create new ones every morning and every time 'self-interrogation about memory and memories' comes from the bottom of forgetfulness to the present moment to change our view on events are described in such a unique and powerful aesthetic way that this piece of cinematograph makes 'Je t'aime, Je t'aime' an unique experiment as 2001 is and will be. No less.