PROVIDENCE (76)

Directed by: Alain Resnais (1977)

Starring: John Gielgud, Dirk Bogarde, Ellen Burstyn, David Warner

The Pitch: A dying writer spends the night before his 78th birthday composing (or remembering?) a novel based on his own life and his relationship with his children.

Theo Sez: White wine constantly sipped, epigrams scattered like truffles on haute cuisine : you can see why people dislike it ("a repellent and not too well acted study in the lack of communication" - Halliwell's Film Guide). I suppose it is quite pretentious (no, I know it is), and it feels rather airless sometimes, but saved by a sense of humour and Gielgud's ornery, literally Life-affirming performance - plus of course the post-modern construct whereby everything we see is a product of his booze-sodden imagination (and guilty conscience), making obscure meanings justifiable and allowing him to change things around in mid-scene. The result is sometimes hilarious, always literate ("and so I passed from childhood to wifehood," muses Burstyn, "without the tiresome intervention of a developing personality"), blessed with rich visuals and a lush, 50s-melodrama score (Old Hollywood stalwart Miklos Rosza), but basically a film about Death, full of metaphors and references - old houses being demolished, men turning into animals (Death as a kind of regression, back to an animal state), Holocaust-like images of skeletal corpses and huddled crowds being "taken away" ("You think this horrifies me?" sniffs the magnificent Gielgud) - and about every writer's attempts to escape his own death by exercising powers of life and death over his characters. Not exactly sure how it all fits together (it's a film to linger over, maybe see again), but what's clear above all is the way Resnais consciously identifies with his hero, drawing parallels between the writer creating the narrative and the film-makers creating him - at one point a scene is interrupted by irrelevant inserts of a telephone, 'prompting' Gielgud to include it in his fantasy. "It's been said about my work," he declares, "that the search for style has often resulted in a want of feeling. However I'd put it another way : I'd say that style is feeling - in its most elegant and economic expression". Is this the character talking - or his auteur?