Feminine mystique

Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda

by Peter Keough

"THE LEFT BANK REVISITED: MARKER, RESNAIS, VARDA," At the Harvard Film Archive June 16 through 26.

Not all the names in the New Wave became old and familiar. Along with the trendier Truffaut, Godard, and Chabrol, former film critics from Cahiers du Cinéma, there are the Left Bank residents Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda, who clung to idiosyncratic visions and consequent obscurity. Resnais and Varda, in particular, immersed themselves in the Gallic preoccupations with style and form, freedom and death, and the best way to fill a frame until the final fade to black. They focused on the plight of the subject rather than the glorified object, on the vagaries of perception, memory, and desire rather than the fetishization of action. In a pack of patriarchal voyeurs, they were feminists.

Such a sensibility can translate into a lot of down time, as is the case in Resnais's classic of frustrated desire and comprehension, Last Year at Marienbad (1961; June 18 at 8:30 p.m. and June 22 at 9:15 p.m.). The characters have no names and the plot shrivels into repetition and ambiguity; only the setting endures, a Baroque geometry embodying the dread and ecstasy of both the seeker and the sought. The labyrinth of time meanders with greater specificity in Resnais's Muriel (1963; June 21 at 9 p.m.), which many regard as his best film. It's certainly one of his most challenging: this story of a woman whose lover returns after 30 years is an exercise in the fragmentation of consciousness and the desperate fictions invented to patch it together. As in Marienbad, architecture is a dominant metaphor, with war-ravaged Boulogne-sur-Mer's ruins and reconstruction looming over Resnais's frantic, incantatory editing.

Continuity fares better in La guerre est finie ("The War Is Over"; 1966; June 23 at 9:30 p.m.), and that's due largely to Yves Montand as Carlos (or is it Domingo?, a leftist agent who's learned to be patient to the point of inertia. Thirty years after the Spanish Civil Work, his outfit's agenda consists of crossing the border, plotting strikes, attending meetings, and getting arrested. Mostly, though, Carlos broods about the past as the disastrous present of passion, ambition, and poor judgment envelops him in disjointed sequences.

In La guerre est finie, Resnais allows the maelstrom of memory and experience a shaping author of sorts. More control is assumed by the scientists in Je t'aime, Je t'aime (1968; June 16 at 8:30 p.m. and June 17 at 9 p.m.). They've devised a time machine (it looks like a giant garlic bulb or a collapsed Millennium Dome) and have enlisted a failed suicide as its first subject. Strapped into the machine's womblike interior, he's propelled into . . . a Resnais movie, a kaleidoscope of repeated moments from his life -- not the high/low points, such as when he fell in love or murdered his mistress, but off moments, as when he sits in his office wondering whether it will always be three o'clock. Tortuous, absurd, and perversely liberating, Je t'aime, je t'aime lives up to its title.

Not so Providence (1977; June 25 at 9:30 p.m. and June 27 at 7 p.m.), in which the author of the text is an author -- an aging novelist (played plummily by the late John Gielgud) who spends a sleepless night drinking wine and concocting a silly dystopic novel featuring family members. More cogent is Mon oncle d'Amérique (1980; June 28 at 9:15 p.m. and June 30 at 9:15 p.m.). The interlinked lives of three characters are analyzed by a behaviorist psychologist, who explains how they are determined by social conditioning. Or are they free? At moments of crisis, images of their favorite film stars pop up as icons of transcendence -- or mockery.

Such an icon stars in Agnès Varda's Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7; 1961; June 23 at 8 p.m. and June 26 at 7 p.m.), a pop singer whose Barbie Doll beauty and costly gewgaws can't help when she's awaiting the results of a medical test. The time prior to learning her fate she spends chatting, crying, shopping, gazing into mirrors, rehearsing a tune, flirting with a soldier heading back to Algeria -- in short, engaged in one of the most exhilarating 90 minutes of living in Paris committed to film.

Like Cleo, Varda's Vagabond (1985; screens June 25 at 7 p.m. and June 27 at 9 p.m.) is one of the great films of its decade, the complement to the earlier movie. The title heroine is homeless and filthy and has nothing, least of all a mirror. Yet she too is an icon -- of freedom. Composed like a pseudo-documentary, Vagabond follows its heroine as she wanders through a frozen landscape; the film is punctuated by the musings of those whose lives she touched and who wonder about her, projecting their own dreams onto her transience. She ends her journey in a ditch, covered with the wine lees of a pagan rite, with no questions answered. That, perhaps, is the greatest freedom of all.