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Struggling to finish his last novel before cancer finishes him, Clive Langham (John Gielgud), a celebrated writer, concocts an elaborate and spiteful fantasy featuring the members of his immediate family. Where to begin… Both in form and content, this has to be one of the most forbiddingly complex movies I have ever seen! Make no mistake, this is a difficult piece of work, and I won’t pretend to have fully digested it after just a single viewing. I’m fumbling in the dark here but I’ll try my best…

Punctuated by false starts, digressions and revisions, Langham’s dreams – which begin as an impotent revenge on his disapproving son (Dirk Bogarde) – are every bit as restless as the ailing author himself, whose spasms of pain seem to manifest themselves as sinister incidental details: an old man collapses in the street, people are rounded up by the military, we see glimpses of concentration camps and there are ominous rumblings of terrorism in the distance. The most startling moment, of a film filled with surprises, comes when we finally get to meet Langham’s relatives outside the confines of his imagination, roughly 3/4 of the way through the film; they bear little or no resemblance to the people Langham has introduced us to! This is surely the major theme of the movie: the extent to which Langham’s perception of his family has been distorted by pain, guilt and alcohol.

My two criticisms of the movie are as follows: 1) Whereas in a film like Céline and Julie Go Boating there is an infectious joy to all the formal experimentation, because the subject matter of Resnais’ movie is so dark, Providence manages to be playful without ever being very much fun. 2) The scatological vein of humour running through the film undermines much of the sophistication.

Bogarde and, especially, Gielgud are brilliant. Miklós Rózsa contributes a gorgeous, darkly romantic score.