''Life Of Riley''

As if aware of what little time he had left and wanting to use it to look back at cinema and pay tribute to one of the arts that nourished it, Alain Resnais centered his last two films – You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet and Life Of Riley¹ – around death and theater, both as themes and as central elements of their visualization. You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet’s very title – whose English translation evokes Al Jolson’s first words in The Jazz Singer – suggested things coming full circle, as though Resnais had gazed back at film history (both his own and cinema’s) and seen a vision that used the accumulated knowledge and insights to highlight possible paths for the future. This profoundly moving sense of legacy and hope, equal to Jean Cocteau’s Testament Of Orpheus, only makes watching Life Of Riley all the sadder and more disappointing an experience. Resnais’s vivacious playfulness is still intact, but it lacks both the audacity of his best films – Providence, Hiroshima Mon Amour, My American Uncle, Last Year In Marienbad – and the inventive wit of all his good films.

Based on a play by Alan Ayckbourn², Life Of Riley – like You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet before it – embraces its theatrical roots and themes by way of elegant sets that make no attempt at concealing themselves as such. This makes the introduction of married couple Colin and Kathryn (played by Hippolyte Girardot and Sabine Azéma respectively) quite ingenious, as their wooden delivery of their first lines of dialogue perturbs the viewer, who may justify it to themselves as part of the theatrical device, before that hypothesis is further troubled by the revelation that they were simply rehearsing a scene for a play. Their acting goes from wooden and uncomfortably artificial to a kind of slightly over-the-top exuberance that popular French theatre is known for and that all other actors in the film will display. Assembled by their participation in that play and their common love for theater, these characters will find themselves disassembled by another common love – the titular George Riley, who is dying of cancer and whom they include in the play as a protagonist in order to keep his mind occupied.

Almost constantly talked about but never seen or heard, Riley’s impact on the couples’ marriages by his past and present actions essentially amounts to the same “dead/dying person sets off ticking time bombs in people’s lives and relationships” plot scheme already seen in 2014 duds This Is Where I Leave You and The Judge. Life Of Riley is nowhere near as terrible as these films (although Mark Snow’s educational video-quality score is surely the worst to appear in a 2014 film) but is prevented from rising above its own artifice due to Resnais’s inability to fully exploit the ideas about performance and mortality present in both Ayckbourn’s play and his own direction. Riley’s behind-the-scenes machinations and the vaudevillian marital problems they result in provided ample material for an incisive and intuitive look at the performances we all play in our daily lives that theatre and cinema transcend; alas, that promise never completely materializes. Instead of combining the best of both worlds as they did so brilliantly in You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, Resnais and co-screenwriter Laurent Herbiet simply film an average play with a cinematic skill that remains disappointingly separate from its material.

It’s a great shame that Life Of Riley will not join Stanley Kubrick’s eerie Eyes Wide Shut, Elia Kazan’s underrated The Last Tycoon, Ingmar Bergman’s bittersweet Saraband³ or masterpieces such as Robert Bresson’s L’Argent and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In America in the pantheon of great cinematic goodbyes. But in spite of its relative failure, it still displays proof of Alain Resnais’s unceasing enthusiasm for cinema and boundless love for his actors. Even at his weakest, the 91 year-old trailblazer was still more imaginative and vibrant than most filmmakers of my generation. May he always serve as an inspiration for cinematic adventurers of all nations and cultures.

 

¹Or, as it is known  in its original French title Aimer, Boire Et Chanter – To Love, To Drink And To Sing.

²An author whom Resnais had previously adapted in Private Fears In Public Places and Smoking/No Smoking.

³A minor cheat, since Bergman’s final film was actually a TV film adaptation of August Strindberg’s play The Ghost Sonata. However, Saraband was his final film to get a theatrical release.