Resnais. Coeurs and Muriel.

"I had seen Marienbad and Hiroshima and many more in crappy prints all through my cinephilic teens, and I had read and re-read James Monaco's 1978 book on Resnais too many times to mention. Anyone who knows me even a little will tell you that I'm one of those peculiar sorts who is only starstruck by directors. I leave it to you to imagine my elation when, before turning things over to his interpreter..., Resnais took the receiver in Paris and said, in English, 'Hello, Glenn. I am Alain.'" And so begins Glenn Kenny's marvelous conversation with Alain Resnais for Premiere about Private Fears in Public Places (Coeurs), though it also touches on Stan Lee, Michel Gondry, DVDs, humor and a "precise souvenir."

"Both Resnais's first color film (it is stunning) and his first to take place in a recognizably contemporary French setting, Muriel is his first unqualified masterpiece, a film that now seems years ahead of its time in its complex editing and its refusal to validate or discount its characters' possibly mistaken conception of the world around them," writes Travis Miles at Stop Smiling.

Updated through 4/16.

Armond White begins his review of Private Fears in the New York Press by first looking back to the early works: "Resnais' movies constructed images to represent cogitation, memory and imagination. Though easily copied, they were never matched; only traduced by movies like Memento, The Matrix and Stranger than Fiction - or unacknowledged by our timid and conventional contemporary film culture.... Resnais is the most influential yet least familiar filmmaker from that period Philip Lopate called the 'heroic age of moviegoing.' Watching Private Fears gives one that 60s heroic feeling due to Resnais' still-challenging emphasis on form."

"I found the interlocking bitterness of [Alan] Ayckbourn's play (adapted by Jean-Michel Ribes) irritating and overly neat, and these people don't seem to belong to Paris or London or anywhere else, at least not anytime in the last 20 years," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir of Private Fears. "But something about Resnais' rigorous attention to the tiniest detail, his infinitesimal flourishes of surrealism and the metrical precision of Eric Gautier's camerawork - not to mention the terrific cast of French cinema veterans - finally sucked me in, and for a while the patent artificiality of Private Fears in Public Places seemed real, and the real world a dream."

Jim Ridley in the Voice on Private Fears: "Resnais's mastery shows how avant-garde the movie equivalent of a well-made play can be." More from Mark Asch in the L Magazine.

Earlier: Dave Kehr's must-read in the New York Times.

Updates, 4/13: "These days, difficult films - it seems important to add that difficult is not a pejorative - rarely elicit anything but yawns and condescension," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Private Fears in Public Places is far from difficult and that, it is also worth noting, is not a criticism. The film is accessible, pleasant, dreamy, a touch goofy and melancholic. Its modernist gestures are little more than stylistic tics, but there's an image of snow falling on two clasped hands that is almost rapturous."

"I have a hard time accepting what I feel is the resigned subtlety of Alain Resnais' current style," writes Daniel Kasman, who's so recently praised Muriel. The opening scene of Private Fears "moves from a foggy, Psycho-like swooping camera moving over Paris as it comes to rest at an apartment window, and proceeds to film the scene in the empty apartment through Cinemascope close-ups, tight camera movements, somewhat-abstracted background space, precise framing, and an otherwise interested, but never incisive formalism. The effect is of general dulling of a sharpness to the work, missing an edge that truly unites the obvious theatre roots of the source to the cinematic adaptation of its oft sublime sadness, as the uniformly stellar cast continually outperform the fairly mediocre play."

"Despite Resnais's turn to filmed theater, which began with his 1986 Mélo, he's still experimenting with film form," writes Steve Erickson at Gay City News. "In fact, the relationship of Private Fears in Public Places to the Alan Ayckbourn play from which it's adapted is akin to Michael Mann's Miami Vice and the TV series it's based on."

"In Private Fears In Public Places, technique outstrips content for a while, although the script's fundamental toothlessness eventually destroys the movie," writes Vadim Rizov at the Reeler.

Update, 4/16: Richard Gibson posts a shot of Resnais and Chris Marker at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger...

Posted by dwhudson at April 12, 2007 3:08 PM