JE T’AIME, JE T’AIME (1968)

Why does it always feel as if we’re validating or reclaiming science fiction stories? When a major new sci-fi film comes out, particularly of the Christopher Nolan variety, we feel compelled to label it as smart sci-fi, or soulful sci-fi, as if to differentiate it from the supposed déclassé starting point of the genre. Of course, as with any type of film, there is junk and there is genius. But it’s foolish to consider respectable, or, God help us, elevated sci-fi as a recent phenomenon.

Alain Resnais’ sci-fi drama Je t’aime, je t’aime / I Love You, I Love You is a reminder that not only has cinema long used science fiction as a jumping off point to explore the mind and soul, but that today’s sci-fi, the kind we’re excited to describe as being ‘about’ something, is deeply indebted to the ideas of the past. If sci-fi is a genre of borrowed ideas, then Je t’aime, je t’aime is a bit like a lending library, stacked high with concepts that you can see echoed in everything from Twelve Monkeys (1995) to Lost (2004–2010).

Yet Resnais’ film, at just over 90 minutes, is lean and sprightly, spending almost no time explaining the technical ins and outs of the science, the ideas instead scattered about like loose leaves for us to sift through. It’s the story of a man named Claude Ridder (Claude Rich), who after a failed suicide attempt falls in with a private research company who want to use him as a test subject in a time travel experiment. Resnais and his co-writer Jacques Sternberg (who was a Belgian sci-fi novelist), aren’t terribly concerned about equations and formulae. Any sticklers for feasibility are quickly shown the door. Instead, the science here is a means to an end, a tool to interrogate the nature of memory, dreams and eventually, film itself.

Claude, as we meet him, is detached, his expressions muted and his past a mystery. We don’t know why he attempted to kill himself, but speaking to a ‘technician’ belonging to the company, Claude is calm—depressed, or blissful? He’s the perfect subject for their test: single, young, healthy, and ready to die. He isn’t much afraid of anything anymore, only cancer he says, while lighting up a cigarette. He has already experienced something beyond our world after shooting himself in the heart and surviving, and now he’s asked “How does it feel to be alive?”. “It doesn’t”, is his answer.

Questions and answers are exactly why they need Claude for their experiment. He is driven through the green French countryside to the company’s headquarters, which looks a bit like an upscale psychiatric hospital. Sun-scorched greens, blues and whites outdoors, grounds to wander, pillared cloisters and slanted light—it looks as if it could be a Magritte painting. Something feels off, as if it’s all designed to keep the subjects doped up and pacified, brains melted in the summer sun.

It’s three miles from the nearest town. Inside it could be a school or a government building. Claude is told that the research scientists have successfully sent mice back in time for a duration of one minute each. After 60 seconds, the mice then return to the present unharmed, but the researchers now need a human subject to test—mice aren’t much good at describing what they’ve seen. The researchers need a first-hand account.

It has an air of the sinister, but Resnais and Sternberg do not explicitly outline either malevolence or goodness in this strange place—instead it’s just a workplace, belonging to whom we might never know. Claude is in the dark, but doesn’t seem to care. He could be anyone at all, and this is neither punishment nor reward. Perhaps that is more frightening, ultimately, than something emotional or poetic. It’s random and neutral. Any one of us could feel this way, dispassionately used for trial runs and tests and data, reliving our pasts whether we want to or not.

Contrasted with the clinical coldness of the labs and offices, the actual time-travel object is organic. In fact, it looks like an actual organ, or a tumour growing on one, misshapen and bulbous, while from other angles it looks like a giant sprouting potato, with tubes shooting out of the top of it. Men in lab coats on computers surround it like it’s the monolith dug up on the moon in 2001: A Space Odyssey (also 1968). Claude squeezes through its outer skin and inside lays on a large inflatable chair that looks like something grown from the soil. It all goes horribly wrong.

Claude, and the lab mouse next to him, appear to blink out of existence. Resnais and editors Colette Leloup and Albert Jurgeonson utilise jump cuts to vanish the subjects away, an eerie and abrupt technique, the suddenness of which reminds us of death. Claude is not dead, but is experiencing that which many believe occurs upon the moment of death: he is reliving his life. Or, is he remembering it?

Claude snorkels in clear blue water, swimming slowly towards us, his past like the ocean—a behemoth to wade through, moments mixed up and swirling in the brine. We flash back to Claude in the experiment, and back again to him snorkelling. He emerges from the water walking backwards towards a woman. He tells her of the creatures he saw, and the moment is looped. We hear him say it, and say it again, like the record is stuck. The 60 seconds elapse, and the researchers realise Claude has not returned to the present.

Claude becomes seemingly unmoored in time—we see him now in an office as a shipping clerk, now in a Glasgow police station, now in bed with a mysterious woman. He always looks the same, his hair styled the same, his manner despondent, his face a little like a young George C. Scott or Rutger Hauer. And each moment is already happening—we drop in midway through. They look just like scenes from a film. We’re watching them, and get the sense that he’s invisible beside us, watching them too.

They are not always meaningful moments, because we do not always remember the dramatic and sensational. We recall stupid details and trivial afternoons spent passing time. Claude is often bored at his work desk, pontificating to nobody, isolated moments without consequence – but Resnais finds consequence for them. He utilises match cuts so that Claude—and Resnais’ camera—are sitting in identical positions from one ‘memory’ to the next. In one sequence, Claude wakes up again and again next to his clinically depressed girlfriend, Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot), or is it a different woman each time? Resnais repeats, echoes and mirrors. People look alike, and they often say the same things. “I can’t see you with a gun”, Claude is told by separate people in the past and present.

On occasion, the dreams and memories blur. The snorkelling episode floods other moments, like when Claude sits in a waiting room and briefly sees a man in a phone booth entirely submerged in water. In another ‘memory’, Claude’s test-mouse friend appears on the beach with him. There is a lot of blue. There is the ocean and the sky, glimpsed from an airy apartment on the coast, where Claude receives a call from a woman telling him that ‘everything is blue’. Derek Jarman once said that blue has no boundaries, and here neither does memory. It’s all painted the same, it always spills over and soaks through, like watercolours on cheap paper.

There is an absence of romance and sentiment. When Claude tells Catrine in one memory that he ‘wants her’, it’s consuming and violent, and he recalls that the only time he ever saw her smile was when she was asleep, a state that is to him an analogue of death. Will we only be happy when our brains have given up? They are—or were—damaged people. She wakes up in panic from sleep, declaring “It’s terrible. Everything”. Thoughts and memories become infectious: “it only gets worse”, Claude later says, unsure now of who he is. He does what we each do and recasts himself in different roles in his memories, depending on how he feels. Somewhere jumbled amongst the human misery he has grown tired of Catrine’s depression—but is Claude not the one that we first saw back in his office, meditating on how disappointing it all is?

Alone, he says: “I am rushing towards death at 60,000 miles per hour, and the earth will spin on for eons without me, yet I am here holding a pencil on this ball of fire, trying to convince a customer that we regret the loss of his shipment”. Claude’s propensity for navel-gazing is profound to him, yet in others he finds it exhausting. It’s true that we are all stuck in patterns of such utter futility that if we spent more time considering them, we’d probably lose our minds. But is this boredom really what drove him to shoot himself in the heart?

As Claude’s past unravels, as we sink further into his self-pitying despair, Resnais elegantly weaves in elements of a thriller. We begin to question what really happened to Catrine, why she and Claude were in Glasgow together—here, it all feels as doomed as the affair between Elle and Lui in Resnais’ masterpiece, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), while the fleeting, fractured mystery recalls his similarly brilliant Last Year At Marienbad (1961). If Je t’aime, je t’aime is ultimately less successful than those films, it’s down to the dulling sense of repetition that begins to take hold. Or perhaps that doesn’t make the film less successful—maybe it just makes it more gruelling to sit through, and perhaps that is the purpose.

Even as Resnais applies the pressure—if Claude stays in the machine too long, he’ll explode—he overall sense is not of excitement but entrapment. We are stuck in the endlessly cycling psyche of Claude, and it’s dark, cold and joyless in there. Je T’aime, je t’aime possesses a legitimately traumatised air; it’s a film dazed and grieving, the veil of depression never lifting. It isn’t expressively sad or tragic—it’s instead blunt and factual. It’s uniformly damaged, and all is viewed through the same sad prism.

Despite it all, Je t’aime, je t’aime is a straightforward, logical film. One senses that there is a complete story under the surface, a mystery that has been cut to pieces—so Resnais’ real achievement, then, is in using cinema to disassemble and reassemble the world that we know. Je t’aime, je t’aime is as much about the way cinema evokes memory as it’s about Claude and his specific memories. Cameras, editing desks, lights—the process may be mechanical, but Resnais’ way of thinking is organic and incredibly human. His film functions like memory—-imperfect but associative, ordered in a way that we cannot see, by some impulse or chemical spark. Like memory in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975), we sense a careful construction, but if Tarkovsky’s film was wistful, Resnais’ is downright suicidal.

The time machine itself looks alive—and Resnais, like the researchers, is using tried and true methods (computers and cameras) to assess that which cannot be assessed. Will it be our ultimate failure that we cannot recreate what it’s like to remember, or to dream? Or is that what gives cinema its true value—that it’s not quite reality, not a 1:1 with human experience? There is great despair in Je t’aime, je t’aime, despair for what we are forced to remember and that which we have dreamed, and for the process of time which will eventually obscure the line between the two.

FRANCE | 1968 | 91 MINUTES | 1.66:1 | COLOUR | FRENCH • DUTCH • ENGLISH

Limited Edition Blu-ray Special Features:

Je t’aime, je t’aime receives a 2K restoration from Radiance, and is released on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK. Though I have no previous versions to compare this restoration to, it’s clear a great deal of care has been taken over the process. The image is clear and crisp throughout, with a fine level of detailing in the images. The sense of texture inside the time machine is a real highlight—you can see every curve in the wall, all the shades of orange and gold.

The image is consistently vivid, colours particularly vibrant in the many coastal sequences and on the grounds of the institute. Krzysztof Penderecki’s score takes centre stage in the sound mix—particularly breathtaking is the music of wailing voices in the opening and closing credits. Very notable too is the detailed sound effect mix, like the dizzying underwater whooshing that plays over certain memories. Je t’aime, je t’aime is so carefully constructed in its sound and vision, and this release does true justice to Resnais’ vision.

• Audio interview with director Alain Resnais (2007). A decent and illuminating extra of about 15 minutes, here the late director discusses the foundations of the film, as well as the beginning of his collaboration with Jacques Sternberg.
• Interview with actor Claude Rich (2007). Another older but interesting feature, particularly intriguing is the fact that Resnais had planned to shoot the film from Claude’s first person perspective, before scrapping the idea just days before filming.
• Interview with screenwriter Jacques Sternberg and film historian and Resnais expert François Thomas (2007). This covers some of the same details as the interview with Resnais, but it’s still a pleasure to hear Sternberg discuss the film’s beginning, and the fruitful nature of his partnership with Resnais.
• NEW Interview with critic and David Jenkins (2024). This newly commissioned interviews on Radiance’s discs are always a highlight, and this is no different. Insightful and filled with excellent research, this is a refreshing extra for a film that has surprisingly little material online.
• ‘In the Ears of Alain Resnais’—a documentary on the filmmaker with a focus on music and voices in his work, featuring collaborators and critics including the filmmaker himself, actor Lambert Wilson, writer and actress Agnés Jaoui, critic Michel Ciment and others. The highlight of the extras, this hour long documentary from 2020 smartly focusses on Resnais’ obsession with sound and the ways it could be utilised in film. Resnais ideas are timeless and fascinating, and are given thoughtful consideration here by director Geraldine Boudot.

Cast & Crew

director: Alain Resnais.
writers: Jacques Sternberg & Alain Resnais.
starring: Claude Rich, Olga Georges-Picot, Anouk Ferjac, Claire Duhamel & Bernard Fresson.