If the chief merit of Last Year at Marienbad was to hypnotize the viewer with a story that may or may not have happened or be happening, director Alan Resnais achieved the same effect fifteen years later with Melo, a trite play from the boulevard theatre of Paris. The eternal triangle, wrapped in pretentious dialogue which was the trade mark of playwright Henry Bernstein. To admire Resnais achievement, one has only to look at the previous film from the same source: Paul Czinner's Dreaming Lips (1936)starring his elfin-like wife Elisabeth Bergner, a very good melodramatic film with a magnificent work by Miss Bergner and Raymond Massey, but nothing more. The Resnais film hypnotizes you and forbids you to apart your eyes from the screen, simply by moving the camera among the characters in close-up after close-up, while they deliver an extremely intelligent but not specially profound dialog. A six-minute close up of André Dussolier while he tells a story, is only one of the astounding achievements of the director in treating a film as if it were a play and at the same time treating a play as if it were a film. We have even a curtain between the acts. But the marvelous camera movements make all the difference. I know nothing about Sabine Azema (except that she won the French Cesar award for her work in this film) but certainly her performance in Melo is something that anybody would like to tell about to his grandchildren. The film is slow, but you don't feel it as slow, because all the performers are taking their work seriously, and giving their best to their parts. Melo proves that Alain Resnais is a true artist. Many have tried to do something like Melo, but only Resnais has succeeded. I must be fair and declare here that I did not care a bit for Hiroshima mon Amour.

The title is a chic abbreviation for 'melodrama', of which there's no shortage in this urbane period piece about a lovelorn musician enjoying an affair with the wife of his best friend. Director Alain Resnais makes no attempt to open up Henry Bernstein's 1929 stage play or hide its theatrical trappings, going so far as to fade in and out of a shot of closed curtains between each 'act'. The story offers plenty of food for thought, but the nuances of each relationship are undermined by the often dry and detached script readings, punctuated by moments of deliberate histrionic overkill, most of them provided by (an all-too animated) Sabine Azema, playing the wife of one man and mistress to another. Nevertheless it's a welcome return to Earth for an erstwhile pioneer of some of the most opaque French New Wave cinema, showing a subtlety rare even for such highbrow entertainment.

Well, I must say.... of all the disappointments, I never thought Resnais would let me down. However, admittedly, it happens to the best of them. Resnais still has my trust, but this is certainly no example of what he's capable of.

Well, that is to say, the direction is perfectly fine, as is the acting. Really, everybody does their work quite well. The problem is the play that this movie is based on, and the way the movie does not open the play into a broader world.

The play itself is almost pure melodrama, the type where the woman literally roles on the ground in existential and emotional agony over how in love with someone she is. Yes, that type, the type where you're staring at the screen with your mouth half open and thinking, "Really? REALLY? What have you done with your life, surely there's more definition to your existence than this one random guy!" And the guy is a boring French concert violinist. Indeed.

The lighting is fun because Resnais takes the stage-style lighting and makes it even more directional, letting the spotlights serve as close-ups to distinguish what the eye is attracted to as opposed to drawing the camera too close. The camera movements are decent in that they keep the eye looking at precisely what he wants you to look at. But I miss the formal experimentation and the breaking of editing boundaries inherent to much of Resnais's work. This is the first time I've seen his movie edited for strict continuity, and thus you are trapped in basically the one place you don't want to be trapped in a Resnais film--real time. What with the methodical intellectual agonizing of most of his plots, doing it in real time is not much more fun than doing it yourself with no idea when it'll end.

Resnais is usually able to completely recreate the emotional experience of memory and desire in his movies. Here, he has completely unrelatable characters grimacing and trying not to say what everybody knows they mean. It's a shocking difference.

--PolarisDiB