Excellent, a Must See

A Brilliant Conflict

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Synopsis for Providence by Pierre GautardCLIVE Langham (played by John Gielguld) is an old writer with health problems who still enjoys the gifts of life, as his gusto of his daily white wine. He is a storyteller and he tells us of his family, especially of his sons. He has two sons: one is CLAUDE Langham, the official one, a successful lawyer (played by Dirk Bogarde), the other KEVIN Langham or Kevin Woodford (played by David Warner) his illegitimate son, remembrance of some past relationship he is not sure of.But the way CLIVE, the author, changes several times in his storytelling the behaviors of his siblings makes us gradually suspect they are only characters in his story, the creatures of his writer's increasingly intoxicated imagination, products of his writer's block, his hopes, his hesitations or angst, his findings, and finally tells us of the joys, humor and suffering of the whole creating process in writing a novel. Nevertheless CLIVE has to comply to one of the very few rules of dramatic writing which states there is no story without conflicts, and therefore feels compelled to give his characters antagonism, some educated aggressiveness, and the more often than sometimes sex-obsessed image of cynical people entangled in their neurotic denials with uneven bravados on the surface, the whole story being spiced with insistence and English humor. In his storytelling, CLIVE acts as master of the world, but when his characters resist his demiurgic wanton caprices and vagaries, he complains they give him a hectic time and he rants it's them who build up his anger against them, so he is the one who has to change them.This is how, sometimes, after being told once, a scene turns out to be only a draft and has to be replayed with a difference. So we see it again, as CLIVE finds other behaviors and other dialogs over the same characters predicaments and commitments, that would fit his scheme and demiurgic pleasure. The same can happen to a prop, a background, a door, a passing extra. They can be altered, displaced, transformed, appear or disappear on sight, as the mood of the characters or the scene changes, or as CLIVE's whims meddle in.As CLIVE's point of view is preeminent in the storytelling, Alain RESNAIS brilliantly stages CLIVE's complex behavior by using different parts of the house in different ways. The BEDROOM from which CLIVE speaks can be said to be his SELF with both CLIVE's doubts and certainties over his work. The back of the house, its BACK TERRACE, where most of the strange changes occur, is undoubtedly his SUBCONSCIOUS, his backstage, subject to CLIVEs fantasy, to his fancies and whims, and logic uncommon. But the FRONT of the house brings us back to REALITY and will cloture the story. This is where, IN REALITY, his family finally arrives for his birthday, and CLIVE welcomes them on the FRONT lawn for lunch. They are perfectly normal and even quite sympathetic people, getting along with each other, and not the embittered, devious players CLIVE described earlier in his story. Peace at last.After all, this is a secret comedy about life, all in the way it is told - and John Gielguld's best experience as he stated it.

This is in the vein Resnais has consistently delivered since Hiroshima of close to 20 years before - not just on slippery boundaries between reality and fiction, but on the subtle diaphanous membranes from one memory to the next, each one its own piece of story overlapping the rest like the layers of an onion.3/4ths of the film are a bed-ridden (dying) writer's recollections, we are initially unaware of this, but ever-so-slowly the film shifts to helter skelter a brew of whimsical narration, persistent memories, sweat-soaked nightmare, bitter recrimination, a capricious writer's embellishments of truth and literary digress. It is Nouvelle Vague pure and simple, the pastel colors and 'old Hollywood' Miklos Rosza score wonderfully abetting the air of movielike confabulation. Notice too those painted backdrops of the sea and gardens, evocative of Hitchcock and lush Hollywood melodrama.The final part is back in the daylight of reality, in a spacious mansion surrounded by rich greenery where characters we have known as figments of his mind now come to visit (one final visit to send the old man away) as they really are, a marked difference. They are not the melodramatic movie-persons we were introduced to, they are (more commentary here) 'unreally' real and unaffected, almost too much so. Other elements of the old man's imagination fall into place, like the mercy killing which opens the film as his own and written for him or the recurring theme of political activism, civil war and bombs going off which is explained as the old man being at one time a 'bolshevik'. (Resnais' own commentary found elsewhere? he liked the revolution, but not revolutionaries)There is near the end, this languid 360 pan of the camera to irrevocably establish that this is happening in 'reality' and not some studio space.Resnais is markedly not seduced by his own concoction, not like Godard would be. So the film may come across as finally dry, when it is simply the product of a quiet imagination. It is not so hermetic as to be inaccessible, in fact my only quibble would be that it is all too neatly and nicely resolved by the end, it makes easy sense.See this, people. My guess is that young Greenaway and Raul Ruiz both did, then near the start of their careers. Both would elaborate on the idea of a capricious narrator who puzzles about a story he alters by telling and synchronous realities in turns overlapping and generating the others. Both would enlist Sacha Vierny at some point.

At the age of 90, Alain Resnais' new film YOU AIN'T SEEN Nothing' YET (Vous n'avez encore rein vu 2012) has continued to stun the Cannes this year, although ended up empty-handed, which reminds me a cruel matter-of-fact that Alain has eluded my watch list completely, so as a starter, PROVIDENCE, his 1977 experimentally maturer work may suit the case, plus it's in English.So conspicuously, Resnais' opus is quite difficult to chew, the film charts an aging writer's one sleepless tormenting night with his imagination world of a plot mingles with his closest relatives, profoundly literary and surrealistic. The interrelation among its characters are not being unveiled until the last episode of a real world luncheon for the writer's 78 birthday, when his two sons and one daughter-in-law arrive, there is a pure revelation in this paragraph, no matter how irreverent or symbolistic its previous segments are, Resnais did manifest that the deepest humanity underneath a well-protected hypocrisy, an individualist rumination.The film might be uneasy to watch since the performances are flaky (David Warner is rather awful and hollow in it), the structures with their implausible consequences are never quite straightforward enough to be participated enthusiastically. Dirk Bogarde and Ellen Burstyn are less-exploited reckoning on their knack, so only Sir John Gielgud's soliloquy of a pain- molested night is a substantial career-defining work, but the sway is too marginal to lift the whole film. For me, watching the very first work of a maestro is always a tentative challenge, as it hardly gives any trace of characterization or personal antics there to dig, but I smell somewhat of a bourgeoisie blasting and sarcasm which I don't quite comprehend yet whether could be pigeonholed among one of Resnais' trademarks or not, but the film's heady otherworldliness surely invites me into a distinguished world of Alain Resnais, hope PROVIDENCE is not the best he is able to bestow.

Stunninngly edited, beautifully photographed and featuring a rich soundtrack, esteemed French director Alain Resnais' first English language film combines some of the hoopiest dialog you've ever heard with an elegantly fragmented film style. Set inside the mind of a terminally ill writer played by John Gielgud, Providence is essentially a trivial and talky domestic drama set against a background of war as composed by the dying Gielgud using his family as prototypes for his characters. David Mercer's pretentious, literate dialog is a mixture of Harold Pinter and Noel Coward, and the actors, particularly Ellen Burstyn, perform with a miscalculated earnestness that makes them, like the film, seem downright silly. Nonetheless, Dirk Bogarde is dryly effective, and Gielgud's narration is entertaining. Gielgud was named Best Actor by the New York Film Critics Circle. With an old-fashioned, bombastic score by Milkos Rosa, allusions to werewolves, a graphic autopsy scene, allegorical overtones, and the occasional bomb going off in the background, Providence is a curio that's worth watching, but shouldn't be taken anymore seriously than say Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion(84). A critics' darling, and master of film technique, Resnais has never been a favorite of mine, though his classic non-fiction short, Night and Fog(58), is a beautiful elegiac poem and Last Year at Marienbad(62) is an intriguing enigma. The NY Times review referred to Providence as Alain Resnais' "disastrously ill-chosen comedy". Watch it for Gielgud, Resnais' chic, and laughs.