PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES ssss
WHEN 4:30, 7, and 9:30 PM daily, with an additional screening at 2 PM Sat and Sun
It might sound crazy to call Alain Resnais the last of the great Hollywood studio directors when he’s never made a single movie in Hollywood. But classic Hollywood filmmaking, as defined by the aesthetics and craftsmanship of the system from the 30s through the 60s, transcends location. Indeed, many of the best recent examples, like Black Book and Angel-A, are European. And from its breathtaking opening shot, which sweeps across a wintry Parisian cityscape to the windows of an apartment house just as blinds are lowered and a door slams, the director’s newest film, Private Fears in Public Places, clearly belongs to that tradition.
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Made by Resnais in his mid-80s, this movie is a real heart-breaker–one reason I prefer the French title, Coeurs (“hearts”). Derived from a recent play by Alan Ayckbourn (Resnais also adapted his Intimate Exchanges for the 1993 film Smoking/No Smoking), Private Fears in Public Places is a labyrinthine tale of crisscrossing destinies, missed connections, enclosures that poignantly echo one another, and muffled romantic and erotic feelings. The six main characters are so boxed in, bad fits in cramped spaces, that no one ever seems to get it on. The only two who are romantically involved, a discharged soldier who drinks named Dan (Lambert Wilson) and his fiancee, Nicole (Laura Morante), are becoming estranged. Thierry (Andre Dussollier), the real-estate broker trying to find them a flat, is a bachelor living with his kid sister, Ga’lle (Isabelle Carre), who responds in vain to personal ads. Thierry harbors a secret crush on his assistant, Charlotte (Sabine Azema), a devout Christian who spends her evenings caring for a sick and abusive old man (only heard offscreen and played by Claude Rich). The old man’s widower son, Lionel (Pierre Arditi), works as a bartender at a hotel that Dan checks into after he and Nicole agree to a trial separation. Charlotte, meanwhile, lends Thierry tapes of her favorite inspirational TV show, but has forgotten to erase her own privately recorded erotic dances, while Ga’lle responds to an ad placed by Dan, who takes her to Lionel’s bar . . .
For Resnais, confinement has always been primarily a mental state, and the imaginations of his characters seem closely tied to their freedom. It’s also a matter of culture and ideology. His features can be divided into two groups, those that deal with France’s relative isolation and those predicated on its compatibility with the rest of the world: Hiroshima Mon Amour (Japan), Last Year at Marienbad (set in eastern Europe with an Italian actor), La Guerre Est Finie (Spain), Je T’aime, Je T’aime (Belgium), Stavisky . . . (Russians in France), Providence (the U.S.), Gershwin (New York), and now Private Fears in Public Places, a French story derived from an English play. Smoking/No Smoking, Resnais’ first adaptation of an Ayckbourn play, is set in Yorkshire, presenting a skewed French perception of the English that makes it for me the least inviting of his films. For Private Fears in Public Places, however, screenwriter Jean-Michel Ribes has translated the play into French so persuasively that the seemingly antithetical traits of both cultures are fused.
