Love Unto Death (1984, Alain Resnais) (Patreon)

54/100

Somehow missed this one (and I Want to Go Home, which still awaits me) at Lincoln Center's Resnais retro 20 years ago, so was very excited to see Cohen's recent transfer show up on Kanopy. Big screen's clearly preferable, though, if only because the film's constant interstitial abstraction demands deep blacks and a killer sound system. I'm not sure how to articulate the power of what Resnais does here structurally in a way that would make much sense for those who haven't experienced it for themselves. Basically, almost every scene (and in many cases even just individual shots lasting a few seconds) is followed by footage of snowflakes drifting through what's presumably a night sky, accompanied by urgent, keening strings. It's the sort of vaguely mysterious emotive device that usually recurs a handful of times over the course of a movie—I'm blanking right now on which recent classic (something by Van Sant, maybe?) repeatedly cuts to time-lapse cloud formations at key moments—whereas Resnais makes it the cement holding every brick together, so intrusive that it almost functions as a wordless Greek chorus. Generates an uncanny amount of free-floating tension, and I was soon ready to follow Love Unto Death (which kicks off quite dramatically even if one ignores those soul-stirring interludes) wherever it might lead.

Wait, no, not that way! Sadly, the formal mastery serves a narrative that I find both frustrating and kinda repellent, though it's only in the home stretch that those qualities decisively emerge. (Spent most of the film engrossed and intensely curious about where it was headed.) My retroactive frustration lies in Simon's inexplicable resurrection ultimately seeming all but irrelevant—Elisabeth's final decision would presumably be no different had he simply been diagnosed as terminal at the outset and subsequently died just the once, and Resnais does about as much with the potentially heady idea of a person unwillingly yanked back to this mortal coil from eternal bliss as did Buffy the Vampire Slayer's final seasons. Lots of philosophizing in the third act, as Ardant and Dussollier's clerics fill the post-Arditi void, but none of it has anything to do with the apparent miracle that opens the film, which could be excised without the need to change a single word. That's my objective complaint. More subjectively, it's just hard for me to embrace what's essentially a pro-suicide tract, or at least a film that's clearly sympathetic to the notion that one's love for a partner of just a few months can be so strong that life without that person is no longer worth living. Only Dussollier's character views this as self-abnegating nonsense, and the film treats him as the enemy; since I'm entirely on his side of the climactic existential debate, "FIN" became "feh." Still, I'd recommend this to any cinephile without hesitation.