What an insult to sit through this movie of a stalker's wet dream, about a sexist old creepy man whose prey inexplicably throws herself at him, as does her beautiful best friend, while he is married to a gorgeous woman decades younger than he! Many reviewers have mentioned the sheer absurdity of being married for 30 years to a wife that looks to be 40, as well as this said wife happily inviting the unlikely paramours of her creepy psychotic husband into her house, and he, looking like death warmed-over, enters as if he was Elvis Presley, groupies in tow. We are either to believe this absurdity, or say "this is not real".
Which brings most artsy-fartsy reviewers to conclude that, hey, this must be psychological and not real, because otherwise it's too stupid--and so we are supposed to accept the absurd and surreality of it all. But when you make a film that purports to tell a story, and you just shuffle the characters around in some symbolic way, randomly, intending to make some psychological, symbolic points, that's just a muddled vision, not even trying to communicate with the viewer or touch them in any way; it's not a vision of clarity, wit, absurdity, or real symbolism. You can tell the pretentious movie reviewers who also don't understand this film because:
a)they spend a lot of time discussing the director, Flaubert, and external literary theory
b) they do not attempt to make any interpretation of the film, which would be welcomed by the rest of us who "just didn't get it"
c) they gush over the beautiful cinematography (which wasn't all that)
I don't care if Resnais is a legend (I vaguely remember seeing Last Year at Marienbad back in art school); I found this film to be just a dreadful, nonsensical (and sexist) excrescence.
Which brings most artsy-fartsy reviewers to conclude that, hey, this must be psychological and not real, because otherwise it's too stupid--and so we are supposed to accept the absurd and surreality of it all. But when you make a film that purports to tell a story, and you just shuffle the characters around in some symbolic way, randomly, intending to make some psychological, symbolic points, that's just a muddled vision, not even trying to communicate with the viewer or touch them in any way; it's not a vision of clarity, wit, absurdity, or real symbolism. You can tell the pretentious movie reviewers who also don't understand this film because:
a)they spend a lot of time discussing the director, Flaubert, and external literary theory
b) they do not attempt to make any interpretation of the film, which would be welcomed by the rest of us who "just didn't get it"
c) they gush over the beautiful cinematography (which wasn't all that)
I don't care if Resnais is a legend (I vaguely remember seeing Last Year at Marienbad back in art school); I found this film to be just a dreadful, nonsensical (and sexist) excrescence.