L' Éden et après - EDEN AND AFTER
Alain Robbe-Grillet - 1970
(bored french teenagers)
Avant-garde filmmaking and the french Nouvelle Vague cinema both have the same problem: they rely to such an extent on style, that they easily loose focus, rendering the film in question meaningless. This problem is even more evident when both are combined. Such products of intellectual over-conceptualisation tend to feel dated, and rather seem shallow exercises than the political or sociological statements they were intended to be. For example, a film like Pierrot Le Fou - as beautiful and daring as it is conceived - in the end is little but a showcase of great cinematography.
Thus, it's surprising that Alain Robbe-Grillet's 1970 film EDEN AND AFTER not only succeeds in
marrying Avant-garde structure and Nouvelle Vague style, but also presents itself as a very unlikely and unique film.
(Even though it looks like a shot from Downloading Nancy, it's not)
The credits for the film are presented in a typically Godard-esque manner, as text and spoken word. The words "sex", "violence", "mirrors" and "reality" are repeated throughout, summing up the central core of the films storyline.
The film then continues to show us a group of french students raping and killing each other. We are quickly informed that what we see on screen is a game the students repeat every evening out of boredom. They invent shocking and repulsive situations and re-enact them, until one evening a stranger who has previously observed the kids enters their world. Introducing himself as Duchemin, the man offers an african drug to the kids. Here, the film suddenly shifts to a protagonist - the beautiful Violette (Catherine Jourdan).
(drugs are bad)
Violette takes the drug and experiences various nightmarish hallucinations. After that, she asks Duchemin to meet her later on and he proposes an abandoned factory.
In the factory however, there is no sight of Duchemin. Instead, Violette is greeted by her friends from the café Eden and one of her teachers, who unveils that only she knows the exit to the factory. "You must understand", she states, "this is an 8, you cannot leave on your own."
The statement is of a lot more significance than it seem, for here, Robbe-Grillet unveils his concept of the film to us: the structure of EDEN AND AFTER itself is repetitive and full of mirror images of what the film presented to us. When Duchemin turns up dead (or is he?) and a valuable painting that came into Violette's possession vanishes, she follows a lead to africa, where she is faced with mirror images of every character introduced to us before. The re-enactments from the beginning now take place for real, even though the audience is left to guess if the action presented to us on screen is just a game - or a drug induced hallucination.
Much like the magical theater in Hesse's Steppenwolf, each scene has a psychological counterpart that says a lot about the films characters. Violette indulges in violent sex with an artist - a suggestion that she was abused by her uncle, who gave her the now vanished painting as a gift - , whilst the artist crafts statues of trapped naked women in cages. It seems as if in africa, the visitors of the café Eden are invited to live their deepest desires and perversions.
(What does it mean??)
Surprisingly for such a stylistic experiment, there is a lot of subtext, as Robbe-Grillet shows the generation of '68 as a bunch of bored teenagers that entertain themselves with mindless rituals that aren't meant to enlighten, but with the sole purpose of entertainment. The students are revealed to only care for money and their own desires, finding no value in friendship or life. By constructing his film as a self-refferential labyrinth of mirrors, it serves the purpose of a mirror for the audience - after all, in 1970, this audience consisted mainly of the same art-school-students portrayed as the visitors of café Eden. Thus, the café itself can be seen as the cinema, the games as a re-enactment of the perversions and desires of the students. Cinema itself helps them to observe acts of sexuality and violence they'd be unable to act out themselves.
But most of all, EDEN AND AFTER is a stunning exercise in storytelling and a prime example of visual aestheticism. The striking colors and images serve very much the same purpose to the cocaine that is served in the drinks of café Eden: it makes a boring evening worthwhile and escorts the viewer into a spiral of surreal, freudian scenes, that have a lot more to say about the intentions of cinema and the desires of young people than many other films.
Highly recommended!
