terrible... so disappointed.

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Absolutely brilliant

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

"Je T'aime, Je T'aime (1968, Alan Resnais), a rarely-seen science-fiction cult film, exercises the viewer's mind with superb style. As with the films of Jean Luc Godard, "Je T'aime" has a chaotic narrative which oozes with dystopian gloom. The non-linear structure is a bit fatiguing and frustrating. Still, I like it because of the arresting imagery and magnetic cast.Claude Ridder (played by Claude Rich), who has held many different office jobs, has recently survived a suicide attempt. When leaving the sanitarium, Claude is approached by creepy members of a secret organization which is conducting time-travel experiments. At the remote facility he is encouraged to allow the scientists to transport him back a year in time for a minute. The scientists tell him that they have successfully conducted this experiment with lab mice and now need him for the first human trial. A few days later, Claude and a mouse (in a small container) enter the Time Machine (which looks like a human brain from the outside). The Time Machine (TM) starts up. Woops—it immediately begins skipping like a dirty CD. While the scientists outside the TM lament their inability to stop it, Claude begins reliving short segments of his past randomly without end. He can exit the TM only after decompressing for four minutes; but the endlessly-looping Time Machine keeps interrupting the closing sequence. The repeated perspective of a large brain in the background with anxious scientists in the foreground worried about the brain's condition comments upon brainwashing.It takes a while, but Claude's often repetitive flashbacks eventually reveal why he attempted suicide. A year ago Claude was on a Scotland vacation when his comely girlfriend Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot) died. The two were an exceptionally attractive couple. Nevertheless, she had been the one was always seriously depressed (long before Claude was). The two represent different types of depression. Catrina seems to be bipolar; while occasionally happy she invariably finds little about life to make her struggle worthwhile. Claude's state of mind is more connected with Catrina's poor mental health and inevitable death. He harbors feelings of guilt out of the belief he killed her. The world-weary conversation between the two is usually compelling. Some of us wonder how exceptionally beautiful people can ever be suicidal. Catrina's enervated dialogue is even more heart-breaking when we consider that the stunning Olga Georges-Picot is playing herself. In real life, she struggled with depression for decades. (Unlike Claude Ridder's try, Olga Georges-Picot's 1997 suicide attempt did not fail.)Visually, Resnais is superb. His color choices and use of the entire frame are remarkable. One often has the feeling of being in an art museum when viewing some of the imagery on display. The haunting, Gothic (and possibly Satanic) soundtrack from Krzysztof Penderecki is also very distinctive.Catrina and Claude both share the belief that life is unendurable and look forward to an end to their suffering. Resnais has a cruel surprise in store for Claude: It turns out there won't be an escape to his torments. Cinephiles who don't mind putting in some effort should find out why. However, if you chose to arrive to the revival theater showing this by Time Machine please make sure it is under warranty.

Je t'aime je t'aime has many passionate fans but I cannot count myself particularly among them. The characterizations and the set up are not especially original: a man disillusioned and wrung out by his loves and his life tries to kill himself and, failing that, winds up listless and bitter. He is seized upon by a cadre of researchers almost as spiritually dead as he is, and made the willing subject of an experiment in time travel that goes badly awry. So we have the cruelty of love, the self destructiveness of man and the heartlessness of monolithic industry as the less than novel foundation of this movie.Going back in time with the man allows us to glimpse fragments of his deteriorating home life and of the romantic dalliances he engages in to spice things up and make his existence tolerable. It is challenging to piece together who met whom, when, but whatever plot exists in the innumerable and disjointed flashbacks consists of the man meeting, talking with and bedding several women. There is his mistress of 7 years, a woman who often seems like the dictionary definition of depression and whose wailing and gnashing of teeth grow exceedingly tiresome for her lover as well as the audience. There are two other women -- I think there are two, but may be wrong since it is quite hard to tell -- who are uncharacteristically tolerant of his incessant commentary on his lover's emotional problems and his ultimately unorthodox response to those problems.While all of this is going on the various corporate scientists are monitoring developments but cannot seem to bring themselves to do anything to intervene. This seems unrealistic but it would of course hinder the time travel of the protagonist if he were stabilized once again in the movie's present tense. Thus the scientists wring their hands unconvincingly and the time travel goes on until its rather interesting denouement.This is not a bad movie but calling it a "masterpiece" as some reviewers do seems excessive to me. It's worth watching, but don't see it on a day when you're depressed because it may exaggerate your symptoms to an unhealthy degree. Whether you love it or not, this was decidedly not the feel-good movie of 1968.

Alain Resnais made his first feature film in 1959, and just as most of the films by new wave directors, so has Hiroshima mon amour remained as his most remembered film. In 1961 he directed his second film Last Year at Marienbad which still was strictly in the district of the Nouvelle Vague. In his own words, it was his first attempt to deal with the subject of thought. These two films, alongside with the documentary Night and Fog, are usually the only ones people remember by Alain Resnais. However, after Marienbad he made Muriel, and after Muriel he made The War Is Over, both of which were quite well received and not overlooked. In 1967 Alain Resnais started to film Je t'aime, je t'aime which, despite a few good reviews, was instantly overlooked and left in the shadows of the incidents in May 1968. It's a shame that Je t'aime, je t'aime is Resnais' most forgotten film because it easily survives multiple viewings and is nearly a perfect piece of work.To my mind I Love You, I Love You is Resnais' finest film since 1961, and I could easily put it at the same level with Hiroshima and Marienbad. By saying this, I mean no insult for Muriel and The War Is Over, both of which are brilliant films. I Love You, I Love You is a simple story; it might just be the simplest story Resnais has ever told. But the way how Resnais tells this story is unconventional, unique and opaque; he has completely abandoned temporal order. It's a story of a certain man called Claude Ridder who loves a woman and has tried to commit a suicide after the woman's death. Not having succeed in killing himself, an institution takes contact to him and wants to use him in an experiment. For the first time they want to try to send a man, instead of a mouse, to the past.Resnais has always been interested in past, without being interested in the future -- with the exception of The War Is Over. In I Love You, I Love You this fascination for past is at its most concrete but the science fiction is just a frame story which gives a rational explanation for cutting the man's life in pieces. It's an abstract film and differs quite a lot from other films Resnais made in the 1960's. For instance, compared to Muriel, I Love You, I Love You only consists of about 300 pictures where there are about 1000 of them in Muriel. On Resnais' caliber the rhythm of the film is almost calm, and relaxed compared to the hectic rhythm of Muriel. In the art of editing, musical terms become essential; rhythm, harmony and chord, and in I Love You, I Love You Alain Resnais has completely understood the joy of the editing table and its force to dissect the rhythms and riddles of reality.The film is perfect for its rhythm and harmony; it's as close to their features as film can get. The way how Alain Resnais approaches cinema is cubist (Resnais was incredibly fascinated with visual arts, and made a few documentaries about artists in his early days). He breaks his film into pieces and re-organizes the parts according to a higher logic than chronology. The pieces of the protagonist's life are given to the viewer without any chronological order, and we are at times inevitably forced to destroy our puzzle and start building it all over again. The rules of continuity are broken continuously, in every turn, and this is the core of the Nouvelle Vague; to change, to develop and put the limitations of cinema to the test. Nonetheless, despite Resnais breaks the rules of continuity, the film somehow works as an integrated entirety -- much more integrated compared to the earlier films by Resnais.The repeat of the title "I Love You, I Love You" reflects the repetition of emotions -- the title refers to the repetition of events. The protagonist is forced to experience his past again and again, while being trapped in a time capsule -- in between of past and presence. But living these events again and again isn't nearly as distressing as the agony and pain caused by love. In the presence, he is forced to love the dead Catrine -- he's a prisoner of love. He loves her, loves her and there is no redemption for this everlasting pain that love occurs; suicide is the only way out from this prison, but it doesn't work out either. Experiencing the suicide all over again only leads him to the same place; to the table surrounded by scientists.The small mouse, who shared the capsule with the man, visited the man's presence. The man wondered if he could sometime visit the mouse's. What does the last freeze-frame of the mouse pushing its nose through the blow-hole of the dome indicate? Is the mouse a prisoner of the man's past and forced to live his past again and again. The mouse is trapped in a narrow place -- in a dome. Is the dome same for the mouse as love is for the man? The mouse tries to breath but at times it's just so incredibly difficult.

After the political theme of "La guerre est finie",Resnais returns to his familiar subject,time,in all its complexity in this film which is almost as opaque as "Marienbad" or as unsettling as "Muriel".Ridder {Claude Rich,an actor whom Resnais used many times over the years}is a publisher whose girlfriend is accidentally killed and who feels in some way responsible for her death.After listening to a recording by Thelonius Monk,he unsuccessfully attempts suicide after which he has a lengthy recuperation in a hospital .When he leaves,two doctors who have a constructed a time machine ask if he would like to participate in their experiments. Having nothing to lose,he readily agrees and enters the bizarre contraption along with a white mouse,although unlike the fly in Cronenberg's film there is thankfully no genetic mutation involved. He does not travel forward in time,however,but back ,precisely one year to a beach in Brittany.The experiment is supposed to last for a minute but something goes wrong and he is trapped in the machine.Now he experiences a host of memories brought sharply back to life,some important,others banal,in a kaleidoscope of sharply edited images which brings to mind the montages of "Muriel".The theme is reminiscent of many films from "La Jetée" to "The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind" and this rarely seen film is definitely one of the most important of Resnais' career.