La vie est un roman (Alain Resnais, 1983)

 

In the closing moments of Alain Resnais’ delightfully singular La vie est un roman, one character asserts based on what’s transpired that, as her father always said, life isn’t a fairy tale (probably a more evocative translation of the French “ roman” than “bed of roses,” as used in the most common English version of the title), and another character almost immediately states the opposite, that it is – it’s a measure of the film’s barely graspable scope that both conclusions seem equally plausible (as does a third, that the answer will only become evident when one grows up, whenever that might be). One of the film’s main strands (in his post-WW1 magic-type castle, a rich man plans to have a group of people attain a new level of happiness) plays primarily like a fantasy that ends up tarnished; the other (in the present day, that same location hosts a conference on educational methods) sounds like the most unpromisingly grounded premise, but yields musical interludes, outsized behaviour, and unpredictable romantic entanglements. The gap seems to speak to the hopelessness of any sweeping diagnosis of human motivation and achievement: grand schemes take tragic turns, laying bare their founding naivete; life directions change on a whim; however serious an endeavor the conference may be, for the male attendees it’s still just as much about getting laid.  Both tales are built in part around a gasp-inducing model of the desired world, each an object of delight on its own terms, which nevertheless possibly restricts one’s grasp of reality as much as it provides a basis for engaging with it. In that vein, the film itself feels like a kind of experimental prototype, an early deployment of the theatrically-informed techniques that would dominate Resnais’ subsequent work, and the one that most explicitly invites us to contemplate them exactly as strategies for illumination and stimulation.