Last Ad at Marienbad

A day of celebration! I’ve found another Richard Lester ad. Considering he spent decades shooting the things, they’re remarkably hard to uncover evidence of. The caroselli he made in Italy, which were supposed to be destroyed after one screening, are easier to find than his UK commercials.

I was set on the trail of this one by rereading a 1969 interview in Directors in Action: “One that might have run into trouble was a Grant’s Whiskey short I did in 1960, to be sold to the Middle East. We tried to make it seem like an aphrodisiac! It went down very well, that one, and because it was about the time of Last Year at Marienbad it was done in that vein.”

At 03.01 in this reel we get THREE ads for Grant’s, all clearly executed by the same team. I can’t actually swear these are Lester’s work. Maybe I’ll get a chance to ask him next week… But the MARIENBAD stylistic connection seems clear — the elegance of Resnais’ visuals translates all too easily into adland glamour! And the cutting! That’s what makes me think it’s Lester, the rhythms are so extraordinary. I would guess that Nic Roeg shot these, but again, I’d be guessing. The focus-pulls through foreground objects occur in HELP!, PETULIA, CUBA. There are shots in ad 2 that seem straight out of the park sequence in PETULIA. That low angle of the waterfall!

These ads would totally have been banned later on — associating drink with luxury, youth, opulent lifestyle, became something the authorities in Britain came down on. Admen had to be quite clever to find any kind of attractive images they could use at all. It’s also kind of ironic since I don’t get the impression Grant’s is that classy a whiskey (always faintly disappointing to see Jon Finch drinking Bell’s in THE FINAL PROGRAMME. Maybe it was director Robert Fuest’s tipple of choice, but frankly…)

In a 1973 Sight & Sound interview Lester also claims to have mimicked MARIENBAD for an L&M cigarette commercial — he, Karel Reisz and John Schlesinger each made one. But I haven’t been able to track those down, alas.

Madaptation

When a producer friend saw WILD GRASS, which proved to be the penultimate-but-one film from Alain Resnais, he was thoroughly baffled by the ending, which comes out of a left field so far left as to dissolve into a blur at your peripheral vision. He thought possibly Resnais had gone insane, was senile, or had otherwise lost the plot. As if the effect of that was likely to be a film that ambles along eccentrically, more or less making sense, only to dissolve into irrelevant nonsense in its final scene. My friend knows movies aren’t shot in sequence, generally, and that scripts are approved before filming, but he was so befuddled by the bizarreness of Resnais’ fade-out scene (involving characters who do not otherwise appear, and an exchange of dialogue not notably related to anything we’ve seen) that I think he was grasping for psychoneurological explanations since cinematic ones seemed inadequate.

Resnais himself had said in interviews (in which he appeared quite lucid) that he had used the ending of the book, though he admitted that it works differently on the page. I imagine there may be some descriptive text contextualising the sudden change of, well, everything. This seems in keeping with Resnais’ regular approach, one of extreme fidelity to the letter of the source, whether that be an original script or a book or play, while pursuing a directorial agenda which is free to explore things the author of the text may never have had in mind. I was told that Jules Feiffer was surprised to find, after an agreeable script collaboration on I WANT TO GO HOME, that the director did NOT want him around on the set. One also thinks of Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s reflection that they each had different themes in mind when making LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD. Memory versus persuasion. Both can certainly be discerned at play in the finished film.

So I was forearmed with all this stuff when I saw the film and was fully expecting a gnomic denouement. I was not disappointed ~

As puzzles go, it’s a very charming one.

The rest of the film was diverting but I wasn’t as delighted by it as by, say, YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHING YET, which is truly experimental and moving and beautiful. I wasn’t all that keen on the constant soft focus, to be honest. It seemed to merge with the video look and Mark Snow’s score to create a slight patina of cheapness. I liked the actors, particularly Andre Dussolier as some kind of possible maniac (his internal monologues keep reverting to the idea of killing people in order to escape whatever minor social embarrassment he’s facing) and there was something amusing about Mathieu Amalric poping up in an insignificant role as a policeman. One or two scenes are pretty hilarious, often because of Resnais’s inventive and peculiar editing and framing strategies.

I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to watch his final film, THE LIFE OF RILEY, in time for this year’s Late Movies Blogathon in December, though I’ve never been very keen on Alan Ayckbourn. Such prejudices exist to be challenged.

Ever Green

This fortnight’s Forgotten ties into our blogathon theme, obliquely. It’s a somewhat late film of songwriter and screenwriter Adolph Green, in a unique role as leading man, working with spring chickens Alain Resnais and Gerard Depardieu. It’s charming and odd. “O-kay… well that wasn’t good,” said Fiona. I disagree.

You can read it Here.