If you asked me for my opinion of Alain Robbe-Grillet's first feature L'Immortelle 2 days ago, I would have responded enthusiastically that I considered it my 3rd favourite film of all time. Last night, I had a chance to see the film again. The second experience pulled my appreciation back from its hyperbolic extreme.
L'Immortelle, unlike most reviewers say, tells a straight-forward and unambiguous story. It involves a man who falls in love with a mysterious woman, loses her, becomes obsessed with the memory of her, and eventually succumbs to the obsession. The story's mystery revolves around the femme fatale's identity, which is about as important as where Anna goes in L'Avventura. Whereas L'Année dernière à Marienbad repeatedly questions whether the affair did happen, L'Immortelle builds upon one man's memory of the affair. To him, it is the single truth against a backdrop of falsehood: the antiques, the ancient architecture, and the many contradictory testimonies regarding the woman. It is tempting to consider the film one man's quest for truth, which sounds so dry and academic!
A second viewing reveals a few noticeable flaws. As one becomes less dazzled by the visuals and sounds, one starts to notice unnecessary female screams and several ham-fisted performances. Elements that are used to fulfill the requirements of a mystery-romance can be overly dramatic. The memory repetitions inevitably lose their appeal in the last reel, where the mystery (if there is one) wears out completely and the conclusion appears uncomfortably obvious.
Regardless of the flaws, many scenes in L'Immortelle are stunning in their audiovisual perfection. Some of them even reach the precision that recalls Tarkovsky's usual methods; for instance: amplified attention to sounds, the slow zoom towards a frame that leads to an open space, and the smooth horizontal pan that shows the same characters in different locations. Unlike Marienbad, the music is not always used as a device to distort perspectives. Many scenes stand out as pure musical delight that, despite their relative conventionality, will always make the film watchable. Finally, it goes without saying that the groundbreaking montage has influenced some of the best filmmakers working today, including Steven Soderbergh and Kitano Takeshi.
I loved the film so much after the first screening mainly because of the lovely use of middle eastern music, combined with some of the best edited sequences ever filmed. Alain Robbe-Grillet knew how to reward us with images easy for our eyes and sounds fulfilling for our ears. Call it sensationalism, but it's by no means cheap or tasteless. If his talents could be evaluated solely by his first 3 films alone (and perhaps along with the writing credits of Marienbad), then he would certainly be remembered as an experimental artist who actually cared about his audience.
This consideration certainly holds true for his subsequent film Trans-Europ Express, which is one of the most relentlessly entertaining films I have ever seen. It stands out among all the other nouvelle vague crime dramas with its rigorously controlled but always refreshing mise-en-scene. Nothing feels accidental here. All music comes and goes at appropriate moments. There's not a single scene that isolates itself as the filmmaker's "idea of the day" that brings more coolness than relevance. This is not to say that I dislike improvisations; it's just really satisfying to see a nouvelle vague film brought to life with precise architecture. Unlike L'Immortelle, Trans-Europ Express is just as exciting to watch the second time as the first time.
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