Alain Resnais - Smoking (1993) :: top Movie Channel

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by Jonathan Rosenbaum
The consequences of a housewife smoking or not smoking a single cigarette branch out into a dozen separate destinies and parallel universes, each with its own conclusion, in these two French features by Alain Resnais. Adapted and translated from six of the eight comic plays comprising British playwright Alan Ayckbourn's Intimate Exchanges, they can be seen alone or together, and in either order. The project, a tour de force for two actors playing multiple roles (Pierre Arditi and Sabine Azema), succeeded at the box office when released in France in 1993, and as a unit the two films swept the Cesars (French Oscars) for best picture, director, actor, and set design. They've taken quite a while to surface here; some Americans are put off by the curiosity of "typical" Yorkshire residents speaking French and by the extreme stylization and deliberate artificiality of the sets. Not everyone will like this interactive experiment, but like every other Resnais film, Smoking (135 min.) and No Smoking (142 min.) are definitely worth checking out.
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Review
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Smoking and No Smoking -- not a double bill but a pair of interactive features that can be seen in either order, both playing at Facets Multimedia Center this week -- are French adaptations of a cycle of eight mainly comic English plays by Alan Ayckbourn. The plays are set exclusively in Yorkshire exteriors and are designed to be performed by only two actors in multiple roles over eight consecutive evenings, though this has never been done anywhere. Each of the plays has two endings, making 16 variations in all. For the films, that number has been reduced to 12 by eliminating the two plays in the middle of the series, which deal with the most "typically English" subjects -- a medieval pageant and a cricket match. Smoking, which adapts the first three plays, charts events that ensue at regularly spaced intervals after a housewife decides one morning in early summer to smoke a single cigarette. No Smoking, which adapts the final three plays, also leapfrogs across time to show the apparent consequences of her decision not to smoke the same cigarette. The amount of time that lapses between scenes begins at five seconds, then shifts to five days, five weeks, and five years. Different decisions made at each juncture eventually lead to a dozen separate conclusions.

Both films center on an alcoholic headmaster, Toby Teasdale, and his shy wife Celia, and their interactions with, among others, the school's night watchman, Lionel Hepplewick, and a housekeeper, Sylvie Bell. There are nine characters in all -- five women and four men.

Why has this pair of films taken seven years to reach Chicago -- especially given that they swept the Cesars, the French Oscars, in 1994 (winning best picture, director, actor, screenplay, and set design) and triumphed both critically and commercially in France? Because some English and American viewers find their highly stylized and deliberately stagy French versions of English characters and settings difficult to swallow. As critic Richard Combs put it, "The perversity is that this is not Ayckbourn reinterpreted as a French play, but Ayckbourn speaking French while still pretending to be English, with a confusing screen of different body languages and physical types."

Some of Resnais' American detractors have accused him of being an intellectual; Resnais has denied it, and I tend to support his disavowal. All of his films might be called culturally refined and Cartesian, in the sense that they're largely about the life of the mind, but they generally aren't interested in exploring ideas in depth. In all of his work -- from Hiroshima, mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad, and Muriel (his first three features) to Providence, Melo, and Same Old Song (three of the later ones) -- feelings play a much more important role. It's worth considering that his love of comic strips (which finally found a limited outlet in his least seen and perhaps most underrated feature, I Want to Go Home, scripted by cartoonist Jules Feiffer) and of Stephen Sondheim (whom he hired to write the score of Stavisky) isn't expressed as an intellectual enthusiasm. It's also worth considering that Americans, unlike the French, tend to see mind and feeling in opposition, which can lead to different definitions of what intellectuals are.

I'm devoted to Resnais, and so I've spent a lot of time with Smoking and No Smoking. Yet I'm still not sure how much they've rewarded my attention. After seeing a Paris press show of Smoking in 1993, where I couldn't follow some portions of the dialogue without subtitles, I combed bookstores in at least three countries before I found Alan Ayckbourn's Intimate Exchanges, the cycle of plays Resnais had translated by one couple (Anne and Georges Dutter) and adapted by another (the much better known -- and more prominently credited -- Jean-Pierre Bacri and Agnes Jaoui, who later wrote and acted in Resnais' Same Old Song). A couple of years later, after seeing one of the films subtitled, I bought unsubtitled French videos of both -- packaged together attractively in a blue box that, appropriately enough, is the size of a board game and is decorated with some of the cartoon drawings and settings by French artist Floc'h that punctuate the films -- and endeavored to follow them with the aid of the plays.

I can now see that all this scholarly effort was probably misplaced, considering that these two features are, after all, intended mainly as a lighthearted experiment to be pursued in a spirit of fun -- a virtuoso piece for two very skillful (if mannered) actors (two Resnais regulars, Sabine Azema and Pierre Arditi) that delights in artificial sets and fanciful musings about the unexpected curves lives take over several years. An unfortunate consequence of my exertions is that the films have lost part of their magic for me, though I have to say I always admired more than relished them. The brittleness of the jokey English details is a far cry from the theatricality of Melo -- for me the greatest of Resnais' late films -- and the play with narrative conventions, an essential part of his earlier work, develops without the powerful musical rhythms he used to derive from his editing and tracking shots. The thematic links with some of his other films are somewhat clearer. His interest in national stereotypes -- also found in his previous feature, I Want to Go Home, about both the American fascination with French culture and the French fascination with American culture -- seems to bring him full circle to Hiroshima, mon amour, which focused on a Japanese architect and a French actress, both partly conceived as national archetypes, who have a brief affair in Hiroshima.

That the characters in Smoking and No Smoking are neither English nor French but freakish hybrids makes them at times fascinating theoretical constructs more than characters whose fates engage me, even though the elaborate and stagy studio sets do engage me; they seem not only inhabitable but large enough to get lost in. This is the sort of paradox one often finds in Resnais' work, which can sometimes seem obsessively involving and oddly remote at the same time (as in Marienbad). Still, following the alternate plots of both movies is a provocative and highly involving process, and there's no question that they offer a narrative adventure unlike anything you can find at the multiplexes.

Given the French preference for pleasure over denial, it's probably no surprise that French viewers who picked only one feature opted more often for Smoking, and Charles Coleman, the programmer at Facets, is honoring this bias by scheduling No Smoking five times and Smoking six. I find it impossible to recommend one feature over the other, and I've yet to encounter any reviewer who expresses a preference.
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Thursday, April 29, 2010

Alain Resnais - Smoking (1993)

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