Critics reviews

A puzzle movie with pieces deliberately withheld, Je t'aime je t'aime is less a problem to be solved than an experience to sink into, as Ridder fatally luxuriates in a time machine that's both womb and tomb.

The narrative is emotionally involving, staged with Resnais's customary resistance to flatulent sentiment—often misconstrued as a "cold" sensibility when it actually represents a passion so great as to resist platitude. But the film's soul truly emerges through its incredible editing syntax, which anticipates the formal grammar of mysteries such as Don't Look Now and Mulholland Drive.

it's a criminally underappreciated genre piece, a radical and heartbroken experiment in which the filmmaker's fascination with memory-as-story-in-flux gets an aerobic workout via that most fecund of science fiction ideas: time travel.

Resnais shows no concern for a hierarchy of importance here, instead granting every moment equal weight—from the lingering warmth of a lover's skin to the fleeting craving for salted cucumbers. The result is a disarming cumulative ache that sneaks up on you in much the same way life does.

Resnais' film, ETERNAL SUNSHINE, and perhaps even Albert Brooks' DEFENDING YOUR LIFE all accomplish something similarly laudable: using the medium to provide a vantage point on one's life where the minute (and sometimes major) weaknesses of a character or a loved one slowly coalesce into a narrative that waits until the last possible moment to reveal itself, deeply moving us in the process.

Once Claude's literally sunken in to the (certifiably Cronenbergian) time travel mechanism, modelled to look something like the human mind, things go haywire, and the film transforms into one of cinema's more radical experiments in narrative (a)chronology... The past, then, is pre-destined to become irreparably rancid. The only blissful ignorance to be found is in the vacuous mind of a small white mouse.

Resnais's interest lies in how this steady drip of quotidian moments can be individually parsed and how the steadiness endows the material with dimension and weight. The narrative hard-cuts abruptly from one scene to the next, jumping days, months, even years, doubling back again and again to certain events. Resnais finds visual and tactile correlations with the couple's abrupt emotional shifts, with their insomnia, boredom, spite, the sensation of their warm bodies together in bed.

The question of why Claude shot himself turns out to be a mystery that's solvable only after the hopscotching story has come to its blunt, shocking, unexpectedly moving finale... You can grasp the individual pieces, the meanings of which are sometimes transparent, yet you also need to trust in Mr. Resnais that, eventually, everything will fit into a decipherable whole. It does, beautifully.

As Ridder's recollections accumulate, even the most mundane event seems charged with fatalistic purpose. What separates us from the beasts, the movie implies, is our capacity for emotion—as much our undoing, finally, as it is a saving grace.

...Contorting, wincing in pain, [Claude] screams for help to no avail; eventually one must recognize that Claude isn't nearly as sympathetic a lead without the experiment. Trapped, reexamining the scattered replays of his life way too late to salvage them, you can't help but recall a conversation early in the film between Claude and one of the scientists. It's one of Resnais's funniest comments on memory, which in this prismatic, bottomlessly rich movie is pretty much the same thing as love.

It's been suggested that Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime provided a blueprint for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a connection almost impossible not to draw while watching it. In its structural freefall, it also holds the DNA for Shane Carruth's Primer (a.k.a. the should-have-been cult film of the last decade), and the biomorphic time machine resembles the game pods of David Cronenberg'seXistenZ. Indeed, this may be one of the most influential films you've never seen.

...A masterpiece by one of the living gods of cinema... Like Claude, whose actions may or may not have caused a terrible accident that he can never take back, we're all haunted by something, trapping ourselves in the past. I won't give away the details of the ending, but suffice to say that past and present collide with dire results. We must be willing to forgive ourselves and let go if we are to truly live and move forward.