Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime

laird4.5

aka Alain Resnais stops beating around the bush and finally just makes a movie that's literally about navigating time and memory.aka I went snorkeling, and all I saw was two sea serpents, a shark, a jellyfish, troubling moments in my years long relationship with a depressed woman who I cheated on, work stress, work anxieties, relationship anxieties, and a mouse, and all I learned is that if you wade too far into your memories you'll drown in them.

reibureibu4.5

comes a fractured mind lost in time, and so we experience the melancholy of memory; a fascination of the past that we can re-live when we want, except Claude is doomed to re-live it against hisese brief glimpses we learn more about him, who Claude really is and why he attempted suicide. We see him re-living shadows of his past, everyday moments that belie a broken-down man. But there is an extraordinariness within the juxtaposition of the ordinary, the way these segments flash in-and-apped in time, flitting between moments, experiencing what has again and again. If our identity is built upon our past and how we apply that to the present and future, what does it mean when we know only the past, when past, present, and future all coaleslong can we linger in the moment; when can we move on from the present; how much can we become attached when we know we'll justime, Je T’Aime is of Claude, a suicidal man who volunteers in a time-travel experiment. Scientists have sent mice back in time but need a human body to confirm it works, and so he goes back into the past (his past) but finds the journey scrambled andemory, ghosts from before that come knocking at your door, grinding away at your mind painfully, cyclicI love you, I love you. ad infinitum.

theriverjordan4.5

“Je t’aime Je t’aime” approaches sci fi with a fluid tragedy that is distinctly French. Alain Resnais’ film depicts time as an ocean; each memory - a wave that batters its swimmers back against the shore of regret. “Je t’aime” is the story of a man who attempts suicide, and is chosen to participate in a scientific trial only to be undertaken by those comfortable with the idea of perishing. The test allows him to travel back in his own past - one minute at a time. While “Je t’aime” - by its very concept - rejects narrative linearity; similarly to Resnais’ other works — it is more avant-garde than abstract. The movie’s protagonist has a pain that is immediately understood. The enigmatic aspects of the plot feel grounded in his doomed demeanor. Yes - he, and we as viewers - are unstuck in time. But the burden of misdeeds drags us back to the present with the force of a riptide. Resnais does not impose a complex series of rules on his temporal technology. It is a means of passage; as imperfect in ferrying one away from the past as any other. The increasingly surreal interrupting emergences of former flames and misdeeds through voyages within memory is an idea that would later be appropriated in “Celine and Julie Go Boating” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” But with “Je t’aime,” they are less tricks spanning space and time, and more the inexorable deluge of our worst selves; teasing at the temptation of drowning.