L'amour a mort (Alain Resnais, 1984)

 

Alain Resnais’ L’amour a mort is a uniquely unsettling film, stark and stripped down and unerringly focused, seeming by its nature to demand a deeply personal response but forging a rigorous cinematic space that precludes any easy identification or sentimentality. The film starts in the midst of trauma as Simon (Pierre Arditi) suffers an attack and is pronounced dead by the doctor; he comes back to life though, the whole event initially seeming like an amusing embarrassment, and one sparking a sense of liberation as Simon feels free to cut ties with people he doesn’t like and to plan trips around the world. But he becomes increasingly preoccupied with the idea that he did actually die, studying the Bible and talking about how he glimpsed the afterlife, and then he’s gone, with his partner Elisabeth (Sabine Azema) immediately becoming obsessed by thoughts of joining him. The couple’s best friends are married clerics, allowing a certain amount of theological debate, and the film’s closing words assert a belief in resurrection, but the prevailing sense is of a love and accompanying rationalization that lacks any ready explanation or reference points. Resnais closes off all easy points of explication: Simon and Elisabeth have been together for only a few weeks, undercutting any sense of a long-established love; one of the married friends reveals to Elisabeth that she and Simon had an affair years earlier and even entered into an unsuccessful suicide pact (the film daringly suggests that suicide might not be antithetical to religious belief, but rather central to it); despite the film’s preoccupation with endings, Elisabeth works as a biologist developing new plant species and Simon is an archaeologist, both in their different way focusing on origins (which, however, are also inherently forms of closure). Resnais punctuates the film’s mysteries with shots of swirling snow against a black background, or similar evocations of an unknown elsewhere, as if the film itself were aspiring to transcend conventional form and existence, to merge with the unknown.