Alain Resnais’s Unexpected (and Unjustly Neglected) Art-House Hit

Features—

Apr 6, 2022

Some twenty years into his feature-film career, Alain Resnais had his first bona fide French commercial success in 1980 with My American Uncle. Also a hit in the U.S., it even went on to receive an Academy Award nomination for Jean Gruault’s screenplay (he lost to Bo Goldman for Melvin and Howard). And yet, unaccountably, like its almost-as-good English-language predecessor Providence (1977), My American Uncle has been largely forgotten—it’s long been out of print on DVD.

Why, in the U.S. at any rate, do Resnais’s landmark 1960s films and the six pleasing, easy-viewing romantic comedies that constitute the third phase of his career, from 1997 to 2014, continue to overshadow his underrated and adventurous (if at times baffling) eight films from 1974 to 1993? To be sure, Resnais’s output slowed during these years, and his kind of cinema was eclipsed in the U.S. by the emergence of a new generation of French filmmakers. The most notable film lost in the mix is Resnais’s little-seen diptych Smoking/No Smoking (1993), a transitional work that initiated the lightly playful, Anglophile direction he would subsequently take, and whose stateside release fell apart for reasons unclear. The film-historical importance of Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad casts a long shadow, and if the late works are charming and relatively frivolous, films like Providence and My American Uncle would appear to land on some uneasy middle ground. They are not as “heavy” or “difficult” as the films of the first phase of Resnais’s career and not as “light” as the films from his third phase. In particular, as an English-language art film with an all-star cast—Dirk Bogarde, John Gielgud, Ellen Burstyn, David Warner—Providence to many doesn’t sound like the kind of film Resnais (or anyone else) would or should have any business making in those days.

But My American Uncle is a different kettle of fish. Both appealing and complex, situated squarely in the mainstream of French art cinema, and featuring freshly minted star Gérard Depardieu, it’s one of Resnais’s best films, representing at once a high-water mark and the most down-to-earth of his exhilarating engagements with modernist aesthetics. So it’s all the more puzzling that this of all his films has been left behind.

My American Uncle is, in the tradition of Resnais’s interrogatory cinema, sui generis. It follows the lives of three individuals from different classes and backgrounds in the late 1970s in a mosaiclike narrative—and regularly intersperses their stories with excerpts from Resnais’s interview with behavioral scientist and biologist Henri Laborit, who elaborates on his theory of . . . well, the human condition, basically.

The three protagonists are Jean (Roger Pierre), scion of an haute-bourgeois Breton dynasty; Janine (Nicole Garcia), daughter of a communist lower-middle-class Parisian family; and René (Depardieu), son of an old-fashioned peasant farmer. An aspiring novelist, Jean moves to Paris, passively marries his childhood sweetheart, Arlette (Nelly Borgeaud), and with little effort is appointed news director of French National Radio. Although raised to be a militant, Janine, a natural performer and an autodidact, embarks on an acting career. And René, who secretly took correspondence courses as a youth, breaks away from his hidebound father and the miserable future on the farm that beckons and becomes an accountant at a regional textile company. The trajectories of these three characters will intersect in time.

While on the surface these people and their stories seem unexceptional, Resnais imbues them with unexpected meaning. During the film’s first thirty minutes, he orchestrates a flurry of third- and first-person voice-overs, images, and vignettes that trace the protagonists’ biographies from birth up to the nominal present day (the film takes place between 1975 and 1979). In fact, Gruault became so obsessed with these backstories that he superfluously created one for every supporting character; they can be found in L’avant scène cinéma’s reproduction of the film’s screenplay!

Among the experiential baggage that each character carries through life is an internalized, idealized notion of personhood, embodied by a favorite movie star: for Jean, it’s Danielle Darrieux; for Janine, Jean Marais; and for René, Jean Gabin. Over the course of the film, from time to time Resnais cuts to black-and-white clips of these actors, caught in moments that in some way accord with each respective character’s immediate sense of self, particularly in moments of crisis or decision—as if summoned by their psyches.

Possibly these stars loom large in Resnais’s nostalgia for a now-distant era of French cinema—and after all, the push and pull of memory is a central aspect of his work, no less so than here. Resnais initially intended to incorporate a much more extensive selection of clips, which would have likely tilted the film in a more radical direction, but licensing rights proved prohibitively expensive. The role of stardom in Rensais’s filmmaking evolved in a curious manner. In the first two decades of his career he generally took care to cast major stars, from Delphine Seyrig to Yves Montand to Jean-Paul Belmondo. After My American Uncle, however, he withdrew to a stock company of mid-range stars, familiar in France but less so in the U.S., who invariably appeared in every film he made over the next thirty years. His life partner, Sabine Azéma, was the constant around which his last ten films would revolve.

The audaciously prolonged use of interwoven, flowing voice-over allows Resnais to cover that which is formative for each character while allowing Laborit to speed ahead with unpacking his theories, which take off from this premise: “A being’s only reason for being is being. In other words, to maintain its organic structure. It must remain alive, otherwise there is no being.” Speaking with easy authority, Laborit breaks down the human survival drive into four basic behavior patterns: consumption (eating, drinking); gratification behavior; behavior related to punishment, in the form of fight or flight; and “inhibition” behavior in which, in the face of an insurmountable obstacle, action ceases or becomes self-destructive, and depression sets in. His key propositions are that “a brain’s function is not thought, but action,” and that “a living creature is a memory that acts.” “For Freud, the unconscious is what we hide and repress, it’s all hidden impulse,” Resnais explained to Jonathan Rosenbaum in a 1980 interview. “For Laborit, the unconscious is that, plus things we have learned to do automatically.”

Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the story itself begins to take over, and action starts to materialize from the pileup of preliminaries. A full quarter of the film has elapsed before the characters’ voice-overs finally taper off, coinciding with critical narrative junctures that arise for each of them: René experiences a professional crisis when an unexpected business merger forces him to familiarize his unnerving opposite number, Veestrate (Gérard Darrieu), the manager of a larger, more modern textile firm, with the operations of the company René works for, triggering a demoralizing game of workplace one-upmanship. Meanwhile, Jean encounters Janine after seeing her in a play, and within five minutes of screen time has left his wife and children for her (“I had no idea how that evening would change my life,” Janine says, in her final line of self-narration). When Jean loses his job, and finally sits down to write his book, he is stricken with kidney stones. René meanwhile has developed an ulcer. Per Laborit, these maladies suggest that, unable to escape from or prevail over their predicaments, both men psychosomatically turn their aggression inward.

Maintaining his usual cool distance, Resnais typically refrains from an overtly psychological treatment of his characters—as the fine, measured performances of Garcia, Pierre, and Depardieu attest. And so, despite the fact that structurally they seem intended to serve as case studies for Laborit’s behavioral theories, they aren’t quite. Laborit’s observations don’t always comment directly on the actions and impasses of the characters, and the characters don’t neatly conform to his theories at all times. In fact, Resnais shot the fictional meat of the film prior to and independent of Laborit’s discourse, leaving gaps in the narrative into which the scientist’s own contributions could be subsequently inserted. (And yet only Gruault received the screenplay Academy Award nomination.) For his part, Laborit had only a rough outline of what would happen in the fictional scenes.

In the New York Times, Resnais explained his method: “Films or plays usually arise from a desire to develop an idea or theory through characters or through a story. I said to myself, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to do just the opposite? To allow theory and fiction to coexist on the screen.’” At one point, Laborit presents a laboratory experiment to demonstrate “escape and inhibition behavior” in rats and concludes that “what is easy for a rat in a cage is more difficult for man in society. Certain needs have been created by this society starting in infancy, and it is rarely possible to satisfy those needs by resorting to combat when escape proves ineffective.” Resnais, however, mischievously undermines Laborit, cutting to brief shots of Jean leaving his wife (escaping) and René and his rival wrestling on an office desk (inhibition behavior seeking release through socially unacceptable aggression)—their heads comically replaced by those of white lab rats.

Certainly Laborit’s ideas loom large over My American Uncle, but the film isn’t quite a systematic illustration of them—each character’s behavior as often as not diverges from or outright contradicts his theories. Resnais and Gruault were intent on ensuring that their characters were fully imagined; in their complexity they exceed the requirements of Laborit’s theoretical agenda and maintain some measure of independence from them. That said, in the film’s latter stages Laborit’s voice-over reasserts itself and Resnais obligingly rounds up clusters of previous moments or instances of behavior that actually do seem to illustrate certain points the scientist is making about social conditioning. But if Laborit’s ideas suggest a bleakly determinist view of human existence, in Janine’s trajectory Resnais posits an individual whose exercise of free will, empathy, and self-recognition manages to transcend the very different pitfalls that await Jean and René, between whom she shuttles back and forth in the second half of the film—effectively becoming the film’s linchpin and central character. This accords with Resnais’s fundamentally exploratory sensibility, which resists drawing neat conclusions and remains fascinated with the enigmas of human nature.

More than any other Resnais film, My American Uncle was made in the cutting room, and it is truly a feat of flowing, dynamic, contrapuntal editing. Handsomely shot in a subdued palette by Resnais’s longtime DP Sacha Vierny, Resnais’s magnum opus is anything but just another film about the malaise of modern life. It strikes a curious tonal balance between melancholy and playfulness, and, while neither patronizing nor mocking its characters, provides more dry comedy than you might expect.

But what of the film’s cryptic title? In France and Italy, the expression “my uncle in America” conveys ironic wishful thinking that one day a mythic uncle will return to the mother country from the U.S., wealthy and successful, and solve all his family’s problems—a deus ex machina. In other words, it’s a metaphor for longed-for happiness that it is hoped will come out of the blue. (Resnais compared this wish to the existential longing in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.) When Jean meets Janine, long after their relationship has ended, on the small island owned by his family where he spent his childhood days, he tells her of his daydream of a buried chest of gold that he could never find; only his American uncle knows where it is hidden—and Jean, even now, continues to await his return. He’s joking, of course, but he’s indirectly acknowledging an underlying sense of unfulfillment and dashed dreams. And those dreams become a stunning physical reality in the film’s shocking final images. Laborit gets the last word: “Until we have shown the inhabitants of this planet the way their brain functions, the way they use it, until they know it has always been used to dominate others, there is little chance that anything will change . . .” And then, with an abrupt and daring cut to a faraway place from which no uncle will return, Resnais makes Laborit’s point devastatingly real.

Alain Resnais’s Unexpected (and Unjustly Neglected) Art-House Hit

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