New York Film Festival 2014

[Chris Knipp]

ALAIN RESNAIS: LIFE OF RILEY/AIMER, BOIRE ET CHANTER (2014)


ANDRÉ DUSSOLLIER IN LIFE OF RILEY/AIMER, BOIRE ET CHANTER

Farcical intrigue pursued right up to a lighthearted death

Alain Resnais' last film -- the prolific French director died six months ago at 92 -- is adapted from a British comedy by the equally prolific Alan Ayckbourn called Relatively Speaking. This is Resnais' third adaptation of an Ayckbourn play, after the 1993 Smoking/No smoking and the 2006 Private Fears in Public Places (Coeurs), and seems the most sparkling and accessible and enjoyable of the three. It is not a final testament or film farewell, even though it revolves around an unseen main character, George Riley, who has cancer and has been given six months to live. Even if the director knew he would soon die, as he well might, at 91, this is simply light entertainment; and Resnais was working on another film before he passed away. If may seem mildly avant-garde to shoot a play so it looks so much like a play; Resnais courted artificiality and spliced avant-garde formalism onto popular culture in much of his work. He does so particularly entertainingly here. As adapted, the play feels like a French boulevard comedy (but as theTélérama critic points out, without the slammed doors), with its farcical confusion of wives of friends and ex-wife and girlfriend all of whom Riley convinces he's inviting on a vacation to the Canary Islands, when he actually goes with a sixteen-year-old girl, Tilly. That action is kept simple but it's offset by the wit of the other situation: everyone is rehearsing the amateur production of a play, which George is enlisted to play in too -- they calculate that he will live to perform in it. In the first scene, the breakfast conversation between Colin and his wife Kathryn is bizarrely artificial, and we learn they are actually rehearsing their lines in the play.

The cast consists of Resnais regulars, all actors with a lot of experience on the French stage as well as in films. The emphasis is on their skillful work. This is really just a filming of rudimentary sets. Jerry-built houses are fronted by draped cloth in place of windows and doorways. Films of English landscape near York, the play's setting, are shown, with dissolves into clever and more complete drawings of the houses of the various characters, which then dissolve into closeups of the simple sets with two or four actors speaking. Sabine Azéma (Resnais' wife) is married to doctor Hippolyte Girardot; Caroline Sihol is married to George's childhood friend Michel Vuillermoz, who has become rich; Sandrine Kiberlain has left George and gone to live with a farmer, André Dussollier (underused here). Sandrine Kiberlain and Caroline Silhol are experienced thespians but welcome new faces in the Resnais "troupe," the rest are longtime regulars.

Life of Riley/Aimer, boire et chanter, 107 mins., debuted at Berlin in February 2014 and opened in France in March (AlloCiné press rating: 3.7), playing at many international festivals. It was screened fort this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival. Showing at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas NYC from 24 October 2014.