Eden and After (1970)

 

Including a review of N. Took The Dice... (1971)

Director: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Screenplay: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Cast: Catherine Jourdan as Violette; Pierre Zimmer as Duchemin; Richard Leduc as Marc-Antoine; Lorraine Rainer as Marie-Eve; Sylvain Corthay as Jean-Pierre; Juraj Kukura as Boris; Jarmila Kolenicová as Sonia; Ludovít Króner as Franc

An Abstract Candidate

 

We are already into the unconventional when the opening credits invoke a late sixties Jean-Luc Godard production, spoken aloud with arrangements of words in-between staff/cast credits like a psychosexual word association game. “Game” is apt, as acclaimed novelist and later filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet came to filmmaking as making openly artificial works. His film here is a game, an abstract one with the tropes of a genre thriller played by its characters as a game.

In the centre of this is Violette (Catherine Jourdan) and a group of disillusioned university students who hang out at a café called Eden, acting out scenarios as Franc (Ludovít Króner), the waiter, is their fabled sinister butler who may have been involved in white trafficking and drugs smuggling (or not) in a previous life. They play out mock games of violence, male and female members, such as an act of rape or Russian roulette with the twist of one person wearing a blind fold with the gun, and a die being rolled to choose the target with added randomness. Though I will view Robbe-Grillet's work as being artificial on purpose, I cannot help to see a post May 1968 haze seep over this. There is a cynical sense that these misanthropic students belong to a group who, after the May 1968 protests in France where across the country and in different forms the left wing challenged the right wing, were left in a permanent ennui when they were not able to change the world. With no sense of meaning or ability to change the world, these students at Eden now stage poisonings steeped in boredom. The world around them is abstract by itself, with this marking Robbe-Grillet's first colour film too, the world as precisely put together and contrasted even when, as a Tunisian co-production, he filmed in the real Tunisian landscape.

It stands out fully in mind to this, even in terms of his obsession and hatred of the colour green, jettisoned entirely on camera here next to other primary and secondary colours. Aptly the staged deaths in Eden are within a café which is an avant-garde installation in itself, with erotic photography on the walls contrasted by pop art squares of pure primary colour as the tables to seating cubes followed the same aesthetic choices. Even when the film, as mentioned, moves to Tunisia, filming in real locations as part of its conspiracy plot involving a man known as Duchemin/the Dutchman (Pierre Zimmer) and a picture in Violette’s possession, the locations are still striking especially in the buildings and their interiors, designed with pure white with blue prominently used for the likes of the doors. As a result, a vast amount of scenes in movement and still shots are eye-catching, the cast figures made by the director to position and pose in the midst of all this, as they themselves play out choreographed games even with real death involved.

Eden and After, in all honesty, is a work of pure style, knowingly an abstract collage of Alain Robbe-Grillet's obsessions turned into genre tropes as an artificial construct. Duchemin, as a mystery man, first shakes the film towards a plot, the catalyst when he enters the café and shows the learnt knowledge of esoteric abilities to the students from living in Africa, such as powders which induce one’s worse fears. His existence, and possible faked death, pushes Violette to travel to Tunisia and a conspiracy, involving her fellow students and Franc who are after a picture she inherited from her late uncle. The plot itself is a machination, mere context, a structure for the characters and Robbe-Grillet's obsessions, contrasted as much as Duchemin’s erotic masochistic-sadist art, posing his mistress and other women completely naked against white background, against harsh props such as inside steel cages or against doorways. Ultimately this is a mood piece, prominently evoking Robbe-Grillet's real life practices in BDSM among the fascination with games and the structure of games. This could provide some viewers with great discomfort, as he contrasts the full eroticization of women, lusted over in their nudity, against their apparent pain in chains, tied to wheels and being bound. Bear in mind, whether your position on these images, his own life included the importance of Catherine Robbe-Grillet, his widow who worked on this film in the cast and whose career has included being a writer of sadomasochistic writing. With a marriage to the end of his life which included sadomasochistic practices and an open relationship on both sides, she also would become a dominatrix who work continued into even her eighties onwards¹; details like this, of someone important in the director-writer's life, does need to be factored in, his legitimate desires in sado-masochism in real life and his films to be contrasted by the woman who together shared a loving relationship and this obsession with. It at least complicates this even if, truthfully, these scenes are the ones in Eden and After which may prove the most discomforting even if they are entirely artificial even in how the characters are depicted.

Even in mind to this, his general fascination (and clear fantasies) of beautiful women in forms of restraint, usually naked here, is an acquired taste and one that become more prominent in his films when they found colour, the erotic becoming more a factor as he went with his film career. The artifice is still there in the actresses (as people and their bodies) posed and contrasted against pure white and manmade objects, and even the male actors are figures he places onscreen. The use of blood, obviously fake but profuse and in vast quantities in deep poster red, is more lurid and shocking in its artifice, such as a suicide in a pure white Tunisian bathtub of stone, the transgression found in something so strikingly simple as using colour itself in purely fictional and un-realistic form. The irony is not lost knowing Alain Robbe-Grillet was an author, using words first, using the visuals themselves here to great effect, which is why too Igor Luther as the cinematographer and Anton Krajcovic for art direction deserve a huge amount of praise for what the pair brought to the film with Robbe-Grillet.

The second half of Eden and After, in Tunisia, still progresses the template of a plot, but is also more of a non-linear piece with Violette experiencing the web of deceit and conspiracy in her relationship with Duchemin and those trying to find the picture. It is, even for Robbe-Grillet's films I have seen, a work which is explicitly more of a conceptual piece, an avant garde production just as liable to have turned into a later era Jean-Luc Godard film as it is undoubtedly a lurid genre piece from this era of sexploitation. The content of the film, more extreme than before, is of a type Alain Robbe-Grillet would fit more in with his later films if still out of synch with them, too avant-garde and too idiosyncratic for even that sexploitation tag to fully work for them. Certainly it is as compelling as it is incredibly idiosyncratic, the equivalent for a famous author penning a pastiche of a genre story, dissecting it entirely to contrast its tropes into striking images, legitimately in this case for the images onscreen.

This was not the end of the film as, creating its mirror sibling, an alternative cut called N. Took the Dice (1971) was produced. Deserving to be included in this review side-by-side, Robbe-Grillet created a remix of Eden and After, which included existing footage with outtakes and materials from the shot itself. The narrator, with dice, talks at the beginning directly to the viewers on TV having to be in an order, with shows that need to be explained, with a complete lack of enigma; the irony is that, whilst this deliberately obfuscates this later eventually to question this concept, Robbe-Grillet here is playing a perverse game of taking a work, originally meant to deconstruct a story, and turning into a work of telling a new story, through reused footage and that not used in the original version.

Tonally it does feel different, right in the beginning with significant greater use of footage of the locals in the Tunisia shot before.  Violette is now the nameless figure to be christened Eve, a figure N. is aware of from his past as he gives her this name and gives us this tale she is within. Duchemin is now a nefarious older man with connections to female slavery with an interest with Eve, the painting of the first film still important but the context changed. This does not feel like a pointless reinterpretation as, whilst the use of older footage is prominent, the context is radically changed, and the previously unseen footage adds a lot. There is even humour, like the fake advertisement (using scenes in the Eden cafe) of a personal anti-pick pocket/theft device for women that can fit in their pocket. Now a story of Duchemin being a trafficker in kidnapped women, Eve his newest target, and other characters trying to rescue her, Robbe-Grillet not only changes the story completely, showing how stories can be told with the same footage, but this even brings in realities within realities, where alternative realities between Tunisia and the Eden cafe can be entered between each other, becoming as abstract as the original as a result in its own distinct way. The only aspect which is unexpected to Alain Robbe-Grillet himself is that far less, if almost none, of the BDSM themes are here, and whilst sensuality is referred to, it is never explicitly depicted either even in nudity, which also changes the tone. The more expected aspect, considering its sister film, is when this ends with the joke that our lead has won a washing machine, least a post card says so. It is not really a spoiler to a production which, whilst taking a subversive route by actually telling a story, is still an Alain Robbe-Grillet film which is going to undercut this game itself. N. Took the Dice does work as its own film, but honestly, it needs to co-exist with Eden and After; together they make a compelling pair, Eden and After the superior film but N. Took the Dice as rewarding when the two can reinterpret the other.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric/Avant-Garde

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

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1) The Thin End of the Whip, written by Toni Bentley, published for Vanity Fair on February 2014.