Critics reviews

One of the cinema's most lighthearted and free-spirited farewells... Resnais's cheerful artifice distills his characters' lifetimes of regret, frustration, and pain into an elegant envoi; in a minute-long monologue delivered by Sabine Azéma—Resnais's wife, now his widow—the director, famous for his manipulations of time, divulges the romantic secret at the core of his art.

The camera highlights the flattened composition in master shots, while close-ups occur in front of a rear-projected mesh screen of white and black lines that isolate each character in a void. It's celebratory filmmaking, and despite its arch formalism, it constantly keeps attention on the performers as they begin to act out their characters' hang-ups and doubts, deriving humanistic insights from their unnatural, deliberately stilted delivery.

As in all of Resnais's theatrical adaptations, the performances are warm and naturalistic, countering the artificiality of the stage conventions and illuminating the universal struggle to create personal meaning in lives bound by social convention.

It's facetious to assume that Resnais intended Life of Riley as any kind of capstone on his career, and therein lies its undeniable appeal as a farewell gesture — he never stopped enjoying a medium he'd long since mastered, and so was destined to go out on his own terms, no matter what. Exeunt, pursued by woodchuck.

Much of the joy and beauty of the movie comes from letting the levels of contrivance fall into place, as with some Rube Goldberg contraption, creating a parallel abstract narrative to the more conventional semi-farcical one unfolding on screen.

Resnais didn't intend for Life Of Riley to be his final film, and it certainly doesn't feel like one. While it doesn't equal its predecessor or either of Resnais' previous Ayckbourn adaptations, it still stands as a perfect example of the kind of unfashionable adventurousness Resnais embodied in the final decades of his career. It is a small movie, often moving, sometimes deliberately silly, and always reckless in its disregard for convention.

A Wodehouse wannabe, Life of Riley is the third Ayckbourn play Resnais filmed, but the substance of the wry drama means less to him than the distanced nature of theatricality itself, as it's confronted and mutated on film. All concerned are just as frivolous with their performances, skylarking around these bare-bones sets having a high old time, clearly playing old friends pretending to put on a show about six very foolish Brits.

Filmed on abstract sets, it's full of playful touches, such as lines delivered in front of a screen that looks like a comic-strip panel, and glimpses of a mole puppet popping out from a fake lawn. The acting is in an arch, measured style that seems to throw off the comic timing. But if this isn't a grand finale (2012's "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" felt that way), it's still an affectionate coda for a master.

It would be nice to report that [Life of Riley] makes a magnificent self-eulogy, or at least that it sends him out on a high note. Instead, it's his weakest effort in many years, though the blame lies less with Resnais' direction than with his choice of material. Where You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet added layers of meta-reflection to plays (by Jean Anouilh) that are terrific in their own right, Life Of Riley struggles in vain to find cinematic value in one of Alan Ayckbourn's lesser efforts.

Alain Resnais's swansong is as talky as any film mentioned above, but where most of those are decidedly dark, or at least moody, Life of Riley is a sprightly, engagingly theatrical comedy: all the grim business of death and dying occurs off-screen/stage—both in the non-presence of the terminally ill, Godot-like title character and the inevitable echoes of Resnais' own recent passing.

One of the great pleasures of Life of Riley is the underplayed skill with which it wriggles out of its own self-imposed formal constraints... To say that the movie lacks the terms to interpret this language is only to say that it's a film made in the spirit of old age rather than that of youth—but few swan songs cede the floor to a younger generation this graciously, or with such mischievous parting words.

The only three-dimensional items in this satisfying cream puff (the original French title is Aimer, boire et chanter) are the six middle-aged characters, but even they spend much of their screen time practicing their roles in an amateur community production of Brit Alan Ayckbourn's 1969Relatively Speaking. Director Resnais makes it difficult to say they are not really themselves, because after a while the parts become similar to the characters performing them.