Review of Providence (1977) by Kenneth L — 17 Sep 2011

Unfortunately, you'll probably never see this movie. Despite the fact that it won pretty much everything at the French equivalent of the Oscars when it came out (although it is in English) and has a bunch of famous actors and was directed by Alain Resnais, this movie has largely for whatever reason been forgotten, and is not available on DVD in America. I only got to see it on a worn-out VHS copy because of a film class I'm in. It's too bad, because this is one heck of a weird and interesting movie. It starts off seeming somewhat dour and serious, but eventually turns out to be insanely postmodern and wacky. This review would theoretically spoil some of the movie for you, but like I said, you'll probably never see it anyway.

The movie was written by an English playwright named David Mercer, but it has enough layers of meta playfulness to have been written by John Barth. It starts off with an English soldier (David Warner) being prosecuted by snarky lawyer (Dirk Bogarde) after he mercy-kills an old man apparently turning into a werewolf. Then, the lawyer's unhappy wife (Ellen Burstyn) tries to seduce the soldier. Then, we find out the lawyer is having an affair with an old woman (Elaine Stritch, aka Jack's mother on 30 Rock!) who looks like his dead mother. At some point, we eventually figure out that none of these people actually exist - they're all just characters in a story being drafted in the head of an old, sick, dying English novelist (John Gielgud). Then some other weird stuff happens that I can't really even describe to you.

So, the movie goes back and forth between the novelist in the "real" world, and the characters he's messing around with in the fictional one. We can see his direct interference, as when his voiceover tells a character to say something, and then they actually say it; or when he suddenly decides the characters should be in a different place and, poof, they magically are. Their story becomes impossibly tangled and weird, and it all starts to take on additional dimensions when we realize that these characters weren't randomly generated, but may actually have some connection to the novelist's life.

The only actor who gets a consistent character to play throughout the whole film is John Gielgud, who gives a great performance. The other actors are all subject to the whims of the plot, but they mostly are very engaging and often funny, especially Bogarde. Resnais's direction is visually quite clever, and he has a grand old time breaking every continuity rule in the book. If you ever get a chance to see this movie, take it, because it's super-weird and not quite like anything else.