Stories within stories, fictions passing as real, mysterious life as this overlap of fictions recounted by some disembodied narrator; so much that is great in film, especially French film, has come from these notions. It has always been about dislocating us from the safely entrenched world of reason and knowledge, placing us on the other side of the mirror so that the apparent causalities that we understand as real are inverted, thus reflected, in the mind.
So the dreamy, oblique narratives make sense - they transport inside the imaginative mind weaving the stories. This is an early example of this kind of film, perhaps thin in the individual pieces, but worthy of time.
So, we have three stories, about three women loving the same man who doesn't reciprocate. None of them safely real, concrete, but vagueries shaped by a collective time and memory. Recounted by the women to characters on-screen, by the narrator to us. The subjective camera that ripples through the screen, now crossfading, now superimposing, is neither ours nor theirs then, it is not a surreal device, but rather attached to that very dislocation intrinsic in the act of narrating.
There is an bevy of then avantgarde technique used in this, which we now have termed as impressionist, a few individual shots from inside a moving car that are pretty astounding, but it's certainly no Menilmontant in the grand scheme.
The rest is in the finale. Oh, we see the man, the cruel puppetmaster toying with romantically wistful beings meet an inscrutable fate. But it seems like the wish-fulfillment, thus magical fantasy, of the wronged, possibly vengeful women. It is rendered with some imagery of dizzying motion that you should experience if you're looking for great images from the silent era. What really matters though is the final shot; the man disappearing in the mirror of fictions, whence everything has sprang from.
It's not an entirely successful project overall. Perhaps because each of the individual vignettes is its own simple world and they don't coalesce to form some meaningful pattern. But you can see how Resnais - where great French cinema is later revitalized - might have been influenced.
So the dreamy, oblique narratives make sense - they transport inside the imaginative mind weaving the stories. This is an early example of this kind of film, perhaps thin in the individual pieces, but worthy of time.
So, we have three stories, about three women loving the same man who doesn't reciprocate. None of them safely real, concrete, but vagueries shaped by a collective time and memory. Recounted by the women to characters on-screen, by the narrator to us. The subjective camera that ripples through the screen, now crossfading, now superimposing, is neither ours nor theirs then, it is not a surreal device, but rather attached to that very dislocation intrinsic in the act of narrating.
There is an bevy of then avantgarde technique used in this, which we now have termed as impressionist, a few individual shots from inside a moving car that are pretty astounding, but it's certainly no Menilmontant in the grand scheme.
The rest is in the finale. Oh, we see the man, the cruel puppetmaster toying with romantically wistful beings meet an inscrutable fate. But it seems like the wish-fulfillment, thus magical fantasy, of the wronged, possibly vengeful women. It is rendered with some imagery of dizzying motion that you should experience if you're looking for great images from the silent era. What really matters though is the final shot; the man disappearing in the mirror of fictions, whence everything has sprang from.
It's not an entirely successful project overall. Perhaps because each of the individual vignettes is its own simple world and they don't coalesce to form some meaningful pattern. But you can see how Resnais - where great French cinema is later revitalized - might have been influenced.