So as I go through these Great Movies lists, there are three kinds of movies: 1) movies that are obviously great, where it’s just immediately clear why people would love them; 2) movies whose charms are lost on me[1]; and then 3) the secret third thing, movies where I genuinely don’t know what I think.

This is the last, and I’ve let it sit for a few weeks to give my opinion more time to cohere, but it stubbornly refuses to.

Superficially, it’s got a lot in common with Resnais’ own Hiroshima Mon Amour. It’s about two lovers(?) meeting up, and it’s about memory and its fallibility. But it’s not really like that at all.

The entire movie seemingly takes place in a grand old hotel. Much of it is told in voiceover narration, often over static shots of the hotel, or of people standing with unnatural stillness. A man is talking to a woman, relaying a story of how they met a year ago, which she claims not to remember.

Is he lying? Is she? What is the movie doing with time? Is this a ghost story? Is it a love story?

I’m writing an entry with a lot of question marks, because I don’t have any actual answers. And according to this Ebert review, maybe there aren’t answers.

This is the kind of meaninglessness that sometimes drives me nuts (see my review of Mulholland Drive, for instance), but here it doesn’t. It really does seem to work as a movie that just hints at a story, rather than revealing it. And as Ebert notes, Resnais has absolute mastery of the movie’s tone — when I’ve forgotten everything else, I’ll remember how it feels.

But is that enough for me to love it unreservedly? I’m not sure. I think probably not, but… honestly, check back in a few years. This one’s gonna need some time to digest. It’s probably a good sign that even as I’m sitting here writing this up, I’m thinking that I should rewatch it.

  1. I used to react with some contempt to these, but after my opinion shifted on a bunch of them, I tend these days to assume it’s more of a me thing than the movie actually being terrible. I don’t think there are many legitimately awful movies that are actually super-beloved by knowledgeable critics. (Except for the Marx Brothers.) ↩︎