Fresh from "Last Year at Marienbad", Alain Robbe-Grillet not only wrote, but directed, this brilliantly rendered exercise in cinematic style. The superb combination of story, actors, setting, cinematography, editing, music and sound all make this a cinematic experience of the highest order.
A Frenchman, newly arrived in Turkey, encounters a beautiful woman, and meets her again on several occasions, but learns virtually nothing about her - although she appears to be shadowed by a man in sunglasses with two Dobermans; when she fails to keep a rendezvous, he attempts to find her, but is hindered by his foreignness in an alien culture. The lugubrious Jacques Doniol-Valcroze makes the perfect foil for the "eternal feminine" embodied by Francoise Brion - exquisitely desirable, in stunningly elegant clothes and coiffures, with a seemingly sunny and open manner, but ultimately opaque. Filmed in crisp black-and-white images, the Istanbul locales (mosque, houses, cafés, streets and seascapes) give the film its magical background of fantasy grounded in realism. The stunningly shot and edited scene in the plaza, at first populated (a la "Marienbad") with stationary people casting no shadows, then empty, with only Brion walking across it, is one highlight of a film filled with many memorable shots and sequences: the fisherman by the bay; the woman seen - in memory or fantasy? - through the slats of the wooden blinds; the cemetery of steles - by day - and at night; the wooded glen, when the woman writes her address on a paper, which she then casts away - and the man later searches for it; the excavation with the long, steep staircase; the vendor outside the mosque who pretends (or does he?) not to speak French, and the photo set he gives to the man, with the woman in the shadow - scenes not soon to be forgotten. In the background, the recurring diegetic Turkish music, dogs barking, the murmur of the sea and the city - all so endemic that it's a surprise to see a music credit for Georges Delerue in the end credits. All in all, a landmark of inventive cinema from its period of peak creativity.
Seen at the French Institute, NYC, on February 19, 2008; programmed, coincidentally (?), one day after the death of Robbe-Grillet. Excellent print, but slightly spoiled by a bubble in the screen, which caused an irritating rippling effect for the many panning shots.
A Frenchman, newly arrived in Turkey, encounters a beautiful woman, and meets her again on several occasions, but learns virtually nothing about her - although she appears to be shadowed by a man in sunglasses with two Dobermans; when she fails to keep a rendezvous, he attempts to find her, but is hindered by his foreignness in an alien culture. The lugubrious Jacques Doniol-Valcroze makes the perfect foil for the "eternal feminine" embodied by Francoise Brion - exquisitely desirable, in stunningly elegant clothes and coiffures, with a seemingly sunny and open manner, but ultimately opaque. Filmed in crisp black-and-white images, the Istanbul locales (mosque, houses, cafés, streets and seascapes) give the film its magical background of fantasy grounded in realism. The stunningly shot and edited scene in the plaza, at first populated (a la "Marienbad") with stationary people casting no shadows, then empty, with only Brion walking across it, is one highlight of a film filled with many memorable shots and sequences: the fisherman by the bay; the woman seen - in memory or fantasy? - through the slats of the wooden blinds; the cemetery of steles - by day - and at night; the wooded glen, when the woman writes her address on a paper, which she then casts away - and the man later searches for it; the excavation with the long, steep staircase; the vendor outside the mosque who pretends (or does he?) not to speak French, and the photo set he gives to the man, with the woman in the shadow - scenes not soon to be forgotten. In the background, the recurring diegetic Turkish music, dogs barking, the murmur of the sea and the city - all so endemic that it's a surprise to see a music credit for Georges Delerue in the end credits. All in all, a landmark of inventive cinema from its period of peak creativity.
Seen at the French Institute, NYC, on February 19, 2008; programmed, coincidentally (?), one day after the death of Robbe-Grillet. Excellent print, but slightly spoiled by a bubble in the screen, which caused an irritating rippling effect for the many panning shots.