You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

On their single night together, Eurydice mumbles in her sleep: “It’s so difficult.” Orpheus, according to Jean Anouilh’s play, hears the words but doesn’t understand what she means. The next morning, Eurydice flees, departing on a bus for Toulon and dies in an accident on the highway. “It’s so difficult” refers to the impossibility of men and women ever fully understanding one another. This is the great and dismaying theme dramatized by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Female vanity and fickleness, male pride and jealousy and possessiveness -- these ineradicable characteristics in human nature destroy any opportunity for lasting love and happiness. Great love is immortal, the myth tells us: it persists beyond death and unto the gates of Hell itself. But it is equally true -- and the myth informs us of this as well -- that catastrophic misunderstandings between the sexes also persist and are unavoidable and afflict us even unto death and beyond the gates of Hell as well. In Alain Resnais’ 2012 “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet”, a series of phone calls inform 14 famous French actors and actresses, all of them playing themselves, that a great playwright has died. The thespians are summoned to the playwright’s mountain-top manor, a sort of Mount Olympus among the high summits of the Pyrenees or Alps. The actors are gathered in a great round room with a cloister-walk at its perimeter and a sky-band overhead. The place is a cosmos with chaotic winds blowing outside, an environment obviously stylized, like a vast theater set. The actors and actresses sit in big chairs upholstered in funereal black and an enigmatic, half-smiling psychopompus, a white-haired valet who looks like Hugh Hefner, darkens the room and shows a film on a big screen at one end of the hall. The deceased playwright appears on-screen and salutes the company and says that the three women among the mourners have all performed, at one time or another, in his drama about Eurydice and Orpheus. Similarly, the male actors have all appeared in one role or another in the play over the years. The playwright invites his friends to watch an avant-garde version of the play, rehearsals of the so-called Compagnie de la Columbe, on the screen. So the drama about Orpheus and Eurydice begins and, as the play advances, the actors in the audience begin to remember lines and commence reciting them at first, then, acting out scenes, and, finally, are absorbed into a series of stylized sets where they perform roles in the drama. This device allows Resnais to stage scenes from Anouilh’s play (or plays) with the greatest actors of his epoch, all of these men and women very old now, but playing, in their memories it seems, the parts of the young lovers. The effect is initially startling -- ancient, dignified actors playing parts written for men and women sixty years younger. Furthermore, the playwright has invited three separate male-female couples to act the title roles of Eurydice and Orpheus -- this results in some scenes being shown three times, moments of high drama repeated in differing interpretations by the actors in the Olympian palace (and, to further complicate matters, their performances doubled again by the young people in the Compagnie de la Columbe whose rehearsal of the play we are also watching in interpolated scenes on the big screen in the mansion, the movie within the movie.) The performances are powerful and the staging vivid and lucid. The repetition of important lines and scenes by different constellations of actors is coherent and swiftly, and effectively, articulated so that the redundancy in the film never becomes irritating. And, indeed, as the film progresses, the picture focuses more and more on specific sets of actors and actresses, allowing them to hold the screen in extended scenes that last five or six minutes at time. Despite the film’s complexity, it is all disconcertingly clear and lucid, almost abstract, a series of theorems and proofs relating to the differing arts of theater and film. All of the sets are obviously theatrical and, with the exception of a tiny epilogue-like sequence in a cemetery in the film’s penultimate scene, the acting and mise-en-scene are all resolutely non-naturalistic. The fundamental problem that afflicts this film is that the play by Jean Anouilh is highly poetic, static, and filled with rather vapid, ambitious and philosophical speeches. I have no doubt that the writing, which seems to me to be in the tradition of Racine, is extraordinary enough, but it seems awfully pretentious to non-French-speaking viewers. Resnais’ staging is beyond reproach, but the point of the exercise seems a bit self-indulgent -- the movie gives the old director (he died in March 2014) an opportunity to work with great and magisterial actors and actresses and lets him use them in ways that their age would not otherwise allow -- old people playing passionate young lovers. But the conceit is poetic, I think, and moving in some ways -- a tribute to play-acting and the theater that defies the fundamental human problem of time and aging. I just wish the play that affords the framework for the film was better or, at least, more congenial to Shakespeare-influenced English-speaking audiences. There is one great moment: an intertitle says “As they crossed the bridge, the ghosts came forth to meet them…” I knew that this line was hauntingly familiar -- in fact, it cites an intertitle from Murnau’s “Nosferatu.”