Review of Providence (1977) by Roger T — 30 Apr 2009

From the opening scenes of Providence it is evidently clear that we're in the skilled hands of Alain Resnais. His trademark slow, wandering pan shots wander turned up towards tree branches, around magnificent buildings and so on. A patrol roams the forest, shooting into the brush. One man wounds and old man, then shoots him he says out of pity. The old man is turning into a werewolf, apparently. The military man is Kevin Woodford, and he is prosecuted in court by Claude Langham, as his wife watches. She is sympathetic to Woodford, and after he is acquitted, shows up to lunch with him. She leaves with him and takes him to their home where she attempts to seduce him. All the while a voice narrates, somewhat confused. We learn it is a dying author, Clive Langham, Claude's father, struggling to hammer out the plot to a novel while he lays in bed, drinking, suffering through the pain.

The author depicts his characters, based on his family, as cold, adulterous, and spiteful. Claude and his wife quarrel, as he takes on Woodford as he hangs around their home, share drinks, and so on. It's for the most part a detached battle of passive aggression. Woodford seems a layman to Claude's bourgeoisie. In traditional fashion, Resnais constructs conflicts for the most part through discussion, double entendre and suggestive and layered dialogue. Bombs and gunshots go off from the army and apparant terrorists, but none strike so sharply as the dialogue.

Many have complained that Providence, like Marienbad, are too confusing, too inaccessible to truly enjoy. Certainly, Resnais hides the point of his films deep within, but that is one of their most endearing qualities. Also especially enjoyable is the construction of his films. Resnais, like his Italian counter part Antonioni, was always obsessed with architecture, and used it frequently as a mammoth point of symbolism in his films. In Providence sets and locations change with the mood of the author's interpretations, from stately hotels and restaurants, to courtrooms, forests, and at one point a white cottage on a beach that is intentionally done with matte paintings to accentuate the lucid dreaming of the author's drunken and possibly hallucinatory mind. The construction of the characters dialogue also highlights the wandering mind. Often characters in a discussion with each other seem to be on about entirely different subjects.

The film's big pay off comes at the end when the author's real life family come to visit him on his birthday. It's here we found out why the author's perception of his characters are filtered as they have been. It may seem something of a mystery, and certainly is not going to spelled out for you, however.

Alain Resnais is often overshadowed in history by his Nouvelle Vague counterparts such as Jean-Luc Goddard (though Resnais is more closely associated with the Left Bank of artists in France). Yet his influence and importance to equally, if not more, significant to the evolution of filmmaking. His additions to the arts, stylistic and intellectual, are extraordinary. His abstractness and impenetrability have made him something of a fringe filmmaker in comparison to others. But though his most well known works were his first three (Night and Fog, Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Last Year at Marienbad - all three revolutionary achievements in narrative assembly), Resnais had a long and fruitful career, and still does: his latest film will debut at this years Cannes film festival.