Alain Resnais, God, and ‘Providence’

Breaking molds of one sort or another is what great art is all about. As early as the late 1940s, the French director Alain Resnais perceived the unique ability of film to take apart and reassemble fragments of time. As a result, Resnais used the medium of film to trample constructs like time, space, and memory with impunity.

In his breakthrough film, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), Resnais utilized a melancholy love affair between a French actress and a Japanese architect as an allegory for America’s nuclear destruction of Hiroshima, as well as the German occupation of France during World War II. In Last Year at Marienbad (1961), a nameless man tries to convince a nameless woman that they had had an affair the previous year at a fashionable European spa; the film achieved its hypnotic effect through repeated lines and situations, a time scheme that folded back on itself, and ominous wide-screen images reminiscent of surrealist paintings (human figures cast long shadows but not the shrubs around them).

Films by Resnais were notable not only for their cinematic effects but also for the intelligence of their scripts, some of which were published in book form. (Hiroshima was written by Marguerite Duras, Marienbad and several other Resnais films by Alain Robbe-Grillet; Providence by the British playwright David Mercer.) Hiroshima and Marienbad remained his most celebrated films, but to my mind Resnais reached his pinnacle in 1977 with the often overlooked Providence, a brilliantly inventive, provocative, and simultaneously beautiful allegory that portrays God as an aging novelist who’s losing control of his marbles and, consequently, his characters.

Between dying and death

Alone and ill in his country estate (called Providence, of course), the novelist Clive Langham (John Gielgud) seems to be making a mess of his last earthly days. The brandy glass slips from his hand and crashes to the floor; he shuffles through the dark rooms of his house, seeking nothing more exciting than the toilet. He is dying, we are told; but then, Clive has been dying for a long time — so long that his pompous, fastidious son Claude (Dirk Bogarde) sniffs, “He’s not dying. He’s having a long, drawn-out tantrum.” Claude fails to perceive that there is a difference between dying and death — that all of us are dying and there’s nothing shameful about the condition.

“One ought always to live as if one were about to die,” Clive observes, and so he does. He is a terminal case who refuses to terminate.

Where Clive, sick and cantankerous, has barely an unspoken thought, his physically healthy son and the other characters seem self-conscious and reluctant to express themselves, as if fearful of some arbitrary power over which they have no control. They fight constantly with one another, but the root of their arguments is nothing more than their need to assert themselves. Perhaps, it may occur to you, they are not people at all but characters in a novel whose author isn’t feeling well and so has neglected to sketch them in completely. Perhaps they are characters in Clive’s unfinished novel. Perhaps we are all characters in Clive’s novel. And if that’s so, then each of us must have a vested interest in Clive’s continuing good health.

Contrast with Kubrick

With the aid of brandy and suppositories, Clive muddles along, devising abrupt relationships and constant incongruities among his characters. (An impotent astronaut inexplicably achieves an erection; Claude has an affair with a dying woman who, it later develops, is really his mother, who killed herself several years before.) “It’s been said of my work,” Clive muses, “that the search for style has resulted in a want of feeling,” to which one of his servants gently observes that Clive is “not an immoral man; he is simply one many have disapproved of.”

Note the difference here between the Resnais approach to the relationship between God and people and that of, say, Stanley Kubrick. The persistent theme of virtually all Kubrick films — certainly 2001 and Barry Lyndon and to a large extent A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, and Paths of Glory — is humanity’s helplessness and insignificance in the mind of God. Resnais, by contrast, was much less inclined to buy into such a simplistic (and dramatically convenient) generalization. Yes, Providence tells us, maybe there really is a Great Novelist, arbitrary and omnipotent, up in the sky pulling all the strings. On the other hand, maybe the Great Novelist isn’t all he’s cracked up to be; maybe, like Clive, he’s prone to bouts of sloppiness and silliness.

But Providence also presents a third possibility: Perhaps we exercise more control over our lives than we think. For better or worse, our fleeting confrontations and alliances may simply be attempts to assert our existence in the face of life’s petty irrationalities.

Director’s epitaph

Even if you don’t buy my God-as-novelist interpretation of this film — and many critics don’t — Providence succeeds on another level: as a study of a lonely, paranoid old man that manages to delve into his embittered soul and leave us with insight, compassion, and even respect for a seemingly disagreeable human being.

Because Resnais wasn’t preoccupied with making a point, a gentle warmth pervades Providence. Resnais viewed God with neither fear nor awe but with tremendous affection: God/Clive is an extraordinary old fellow who has been around a long time, has made his share of mistakes, and has often been given up for dead, but who refuses to quit and has, indeed, produced some very impressive work amid his many clunkers. In Providence, Alain Resnais effectively wrote his own epitaph. He did die, finally, this month at the age of 91. But as any moviegoer — or for that matter any arts connoisseur — well knows, we don’t have to believe that if we don’t want to.