The Couples Cast Shadows and The Trees Don't

“Curture Crash”

This means something.

Agree with Greg by the way that there is a strong intent to parody conventional melodrama.

What are you talking about Matt, doesn’t everyone do that with their mashed potatoes?

Notice too how the mashed potatoes are lit differently than Drefus. Just sayin’ ;)

Drefus eats mashed potatoes?!!

I EAT MASHED POTATOES!!!

Well the black (turtleneck??) sets off the bright white mashed potatoes. Spotlighted mashed potatoes.

Awwww…. he’s like a little kid playing with his food. Or someone gone senile.

From page 139 of Robbe-Grillet’s cine-novel,

“The camera leaps: Same setting. A (Woman) is in the same position, staring at the camera which is now directly in front of her. A raises her arms half-way, in a gesture of uncertain defense.
X (Lover) appears in the foreground, seen from behind. Rather swift and brutal rape scene. A is tipped back, X is holding her wrists (in one hand) below her waist and a little to oneside, her upper body thus not lying flat. A struggles, but without any result. She opens her mouth as though to scream; but X, leaning over her, immediately gags her with a piece of fine lingererie he was holding in his other hand. X’s gestures are precise and rather slow. A’s chaotic: she turns her head once or twice to the right and left, then stares again, her eyes wide, at X who is leaning a little farther over her . . .The victim’s hair is loose and costume in disorder”

but…

From an audio interview with Resnais from the Criterion Blu Ray set. “For me, it is a film about persuasion, conquest, an encounter. To me it was a simple love story so I tried to express the emotion of love, precisely the opposite idea of rape. I don’t know how the film is interpreted, but I know the mindset in which we shot it”.

Draw your conclusion from whichever source you prefer.

As this year is its 50th anniversary, it is being shown at Film Forum in New York at the end of December.

Yes, as OlfAudio suggests, there needn’t be one way to understand the movie as its sort of openness is one of its significant aspects. In fact, seeing it in more than one light is in itself a good way to think of the film rather than it being thought of as having to be understood along a single narrative path or having a meaning.

It’s Alain Resnais doing Robbe-Grillet doing Bioy Casares doing Borges…

That feel when mirrors.