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The parallel narratives are swiftly braided: The lavish maquette unveiled in 1914 is next seen surrounded by explosions, knights and maidens perhaps live in it, one of the fairytale characters reaches outside and emerges from under tree roots in 1982, the Temple of Happiness now holds a conference on education. The Exterminating Angel figures in the antique strand, where the Count (Ruggero Raimondi) offers his guests a new beginning after the devastation of war. Top hats are exchanged for golden robes and druggy forgetfulness, milady (Fanny Ardant) keeps a pragmatic eye on the rituals of rebirth. The palace in the present houses a swarm of instructors debating the educational side of imagination, "c'est... spécial," the Italian guru (Vittorio Gassman) arrives and derides the building's faux-Gaudí curves ("It isn't architecture, it's pastry"). The mere mention of romance is enough to morph the provincial teacher (Sabine Azéma) from Little Miss Prim to Jacques Demy songbird, the American archeologist (Geraldine Chaplin) decides to match her with the institute's resident Pierrot (Pierre Arditi). Alain Resnais' satirical Lost Horizon, plus ça change... "Happiness" and "love" are echoed and warbled about, thus psychobabble through the ages: One's search for vanished harmony is as much a dead-end as the other's buzzwords of learning and teaching. (The children scampering around the woods in makeshift armors have a term for this, "double bullshit.") Elsewhere immemorial artifice à la Rohmer's Perceval, no, farther back still, the painted glass panels of Méliès. Frauds and crackpots propose "tepid sweetness" but Resnais knows that dissonance is what fuels creation, the revelatory extremes of fire and ice as opposed to utopia's lukewarm folly. "We'll know when we grow up." The collision of Wagnerian myth and Gallic farce has a happy ending, Altman pays close attention (Pret-à-Porter). With Robert Manuel, Martine Kelly, André Dussollier, and Samson Fainsilber.
--- Fernando F. Croce |