Ny Film Festival 2006

[Chris Knipp]

Alain Resnais: Private Fears in Public Places (2006)

ALAIN RESNAIS: PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES (2006)



Alienated Parisians lost in a (notional) snowdrift

In this sleek but uninvolving French film we get brief looks at a series of people. Thierry, a real estate agent (André Dusollier), is going out of his way to find an apartment for Nicole (Laura Morante) and Dan (Lambert Wilson), a couple of hard-to-please clients. Later that day Thierry’s coworker at the agency, Charlotte (Sabine Azéma), lends him a videotape of a religion-oriented musical TV show, but when he goes home and watches it the tape surprises and arouses him. His younger sister Gaëlle (Isabelle Carré) gos out after he comes home, pretending to be having fun with the girls, but she's secretly looking for love and is dating through the personal columns. Dan, who's a career soldier recently expelled from the army for unspecified reasons, whiles away his time in a hotel bar confiding his misadventures to the barman, Lionel (Pierre Arditi). Lionel has sought a volunteer from a Christian benevolent organization to care for his aging, demented and foul-mouthed father at night when he’s working at the bar, and the pious Charlotte is the one who turns up for this chore. One character influences the other without their even knowing each other. When Nicole and Dan decide to take a break in their stale relationship Dan winds up having a date with Gaëlle.

This setup may be odd but it isn’t complicated – it keeps the characters simple. But that's the trouble: we don't know in basic terms exactly who any of them are. What is the repressed Lionel’s past? What was Dan's career-ending transgression? What work does Nicole do that would enable her to seek a three-room apartment in Paris when her boyfriend's unemployed? And why is Charlotte so peculiar? The characters to begin with are unclear and the rearrangement of their relationships remains equally fuzzy. All these alienated souls are adrift. But so what?

New Wave legend Alain Resnais’ film version of English playwright Alan Ayckbourn’s play Private Fears in Public Places (Coeurs, "hearts," is the new French title) is a study of six lonely people wanly pursuing an end to their solitude. Why is it always snowing outside, and surprisingly often inside? Because it’s snowing in their hearts, of course.

Resnais has brought together six highly respected screen actors and added a Parisian gloss to the proceedings. The result unfortunately is dreary and inconclusive; use of fifty short scenes shifting back and forth among the characters is a serious bar to audience involvement. There’s something about Christianity and temptation here, focused in the apparently pivotal figure of Charlotte, who’s a saintly temptress with all kinds of unresolved issues. But then everyone’s issues are unresolved here, and the film doesn’t resolve them; it just sort of stirs them around and then ends. The inconclusive use of the polished Dusollier recalls his triumphant performance with Emmanuelle Béart and Daniel Auteuil in a really successful and moving film about cold-heartedness, Claude Sautet's 1992 Un coeur en hiver.

Apart from the somewhat annoying poutiness of Laura Morante, the cast is fine but lacking in chemistry. Dusollier and Azéma (who were entertainingly coupled in the bourgeois arrested-development film comedy Tanguy) have the most to do, but they remain enigmatic because their characters are underwritten. Their roles have comic potential that's unfortunatley undeveloped. It's hard to see how any wit could have been injected into the drying up relationhship of Dan and Nicole, and Dan's date with Gaëlle evaporates in a cloud of alcohol.

The New York Film Festival, like those of Venice and Toronto, is paying homage to the great director of Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad (who has not been as consistenly accomplished for the pasty fifty years as Eric Rohmer) by including this film in their rosters this year, but it seems likely to have little future with any audience outside Paris.

To err is human; the “insanely selective” ones of the NYFF jury don’t always hit the mark.

The film is being promoted by Studio Canal and opens in Paris in late November. No US distributor.