"Why should I change hotels?" asks the protagonist. "For the sake of changing" comes the reply.
That pretty much sums up Alain Robbe-Grillet's audacious followup to his debut. Even though this is my first ARG film I can't say I'm very surprised, as his reputation certainly precedes him. He is after all the man who wrote Marienbad for Resnais, as well as his own romans that burrowed holes within meta-narrative.
Two men and a woman, apparently film-makers of some kind, board a coupet of the Trans-Europ-Express train to Paris. While on board, they decide to kill time by improvising a script for a movie - a crime thriller about a man working for a drug trafficking ring and heading to Antwerp on board the Trans-Europ-Express with a bag full of cocaine.
Playing on multiple narrative levels, with the film-makers serving as omniscient narrators and creators who create the universe of the story and improvise its details as they go along, even going back and erasing things we've witnessed to accommodate for plot holes and inconsistencies, sketching them again on the spot and presenting us with a pulply crime story torn that constantly shapeshifts before our eyes even as it progresses. Trans-Europ-Express is then in a flux of constant retroactive continuity, expanding simultaneously forwards and backwards from a central (albeit moving) point in time - from the coupet of the train where the three film-makers brainstorm.
ARG takes inspiration from surrealist ideas of synchronicity, reveries, the 'passages' of Louis Aragon, the Flauners of Baudelaire and the psychic automatism of André Breton. Or as Tristan Tzara, one of the main theoreticians of Dadaism, wrote in a letter to Breton: "Whatever we see is false". So with the story of Trans-Europ-Express. Jean-Louis Trintignant is shot only to reappear in the final scene hugging the girl he strangled a couple of scenes earlier and which he subsequently saw performing in a BDSM club. Such is the nature of TEE's story.
Snippets of cassette playback (as the film-makers rewind it to listen to the notes they've been keeping) coalesce with narration that spills over the fictional story they're creating which in turn becomes real before our eyes as it is acted by Trintignant and the others. ARG's duallistic approach is further transferred on his stylistic choices for the movie. Massive constructions (cranes, ships, dams, old buildings, train stations) depicted in the exteriors while power drills and metallic clangs are audible in the background, cold and clinical interiors.
Beautifully photographed by ARG who shows considerable visual talent for a man who studied mathematics and started writing before he stepped behind the camera; finely acted; entertaining despite its convoluted nature and gimmicks; TEE is a minor masterpiece for the adventurous viewer. It still lacks the dramatic punch to take it to the next level though.
That pretty much sums up Alain Robbe-Grillet's audacious followup to his debut. Even though this is my first ARG film I can't say I'm very surprised, as his reputation certainly precedes him. He is after all the man who wrote Marienbad for Resnais, as well as his own romans that burrowed holes within meta-narrative.
Two men and a woman, apparently film-makers of some kind, board a coupet of the Trans-Europ-Express train to Paris. While on board, they decide to kill time by improvising a script for a movie - a crime thriller about a man working for a drug trafficking ring and heading to Antwerp on board the Trans-Europ-Express with a bag full of cocaine.
Playing on multiple narrative levels, with the film-makers serving as omniscient narrators and creators who create the universe of the story and improvise its details as they go along, even going back and erasing things we've witnessed to accommodate for plot holes and inconsistencies, sketching them again on the spot and presenting us with a pulply crime story torn that constantly shapeshifts before our eyes even as it progresses. Trans-Europ-Express is then in a flux of constant retroactive continuity, expanding simultaneously forwards and backwards from a central (albeit moving) point in time - from the coupet of the train where the three film-makers brainstorm.
ARG takes inspiration from surrealist ideas of synchronicity, reveries, the 'passages' of Louis Aragon, the Flauners of Baudelaire and the psychic automatism of André Breton. Or as Tristan Tzara, one of the main theoreticians of Dadaism, wrote in a letter to Breton: "Whatever we see is false". So with the story of Trans-Europ-Express. Jean-Louis Trintignant is shot only to reappear in the final scene hugging the girl he strangled a couple of scenes earlier and which he subsequently saw performing in a BDSM club. Such is the nature of TEE's story.
Snippets of cassette playback (as the film-makers rewind it to listen to the notes they've been keeping) coalesce with narration that spills over the fictional story they're creating which in turn becomes real before our eyes as it is acted by Trintignant and the others. ARG's duallistic approach is further transferred on his stylistic choices for the movie. Massive constructions (cranes, ships, dams, old buildings, train stations) depicted in the exteriors while power drills and metallic clangs are audible in the background, cold and clinical interiors.
Beautifully photographed by ARG who shows considerable visual talent for a man who studied mathematics and started writing before he stepped behind the camera; finely acted; entertaining despite its convoluted nature and gimmicks; TEE is a minor masterpiece for the adventurous viewer. It still lacks the dramatic punch to take it to the next level though.