Providence
Alain Resnais (1977)
The trailer for Last Year at Marienbad beforehand – presumably the original trailer in French cinemas in 1961, although some adulatory reviews in English had been inserted as legends – was worth seeing. It was more enlightening than the whole of Marienbad itself or, at least, made clear that we, the audience, were expected to work out the film’s puzzle, reading the visual clues on offer. Providence – Resnais’s first work in English, from a screenplay by David Mercer – at first looks set to be a puzzle too, as well as obviously indebted to Citizen Kane. Ricardo Aronovich’s camera gradually approaches a huge house, wreathed in darkness. The name of the place, from which the film takes its name, stands out on a sign that recalls ‘Rosebud’. But Providence turns out to be, even if not straightforward, understandable. Inside the big house, an elderly, ailing novelist called Clive Langham is having a sleepless night. The scenes we witness are Langham’s imaginings of his next, we assume last, novel. The characters in the novel are incarnated by Langham’s own family and their interactions are informed and sometimes confused by the writer’s feelings about those close to him.
They include his late wife Molly whom he loved (but was often unfaithful to); Claude, the lawyer son he loathes and the son’s wife Sonia; another man, Kevin, who turns out to represent the writer’s illegitimate son and whose character in the story that Langham devises never quite manages to have an affair with Sonia, much as his creator seems to want him to. The Freudian rivalries between Clive and Claude are made explicit through the affair that does happen in the novel and which involves Claude and an American woman who, although in the story she’s a journalist with a terminal illness, takes the physical form of Molly. The characters in the novel move in a murky, ominous world of men turning into werewolves, of army patrols hunting them down, of refugees who may be en route to concentration camps, of imposing architecture (a Resnais trademark). On this occasion, the architecture shares the screen with shots of buildings being demolished. These all seem harbingers or representations of imminent death, with which Clive Langham is preoccupied and about which, during his nocturnal conversation with himself, he talks a good deal.
According to Langham, as an artist he’s been accused of sacrificing feeling for style, which gives him a kinship with Alain Resnais. And with David Mercer too: the script of Providence is stuffed with misanthropic epigrams and occasionally, when one of his characters comes out with one of these, Langham will chortle and congratulate himself, as if show-off one-liners were the proof of a fine novelist. These connections would be tiresome if John Gielgud weren’t so enjoyable as Langham. There’s something satisfying in Gielgud’s using his legendarily beautiful voice to slag people off or to intone, after the old writer has administered a suppository, a line like ‘Now let science soothe the troubled rectum’. Gielgud’s expert, lapidary acidity anticipates his perfect performance as Charles Ryder’s father in the Granada TV Brideshead Revisited (1981). What’s also impressive here is his realisation of Langham’s fury with his soon-to-be carcass, and the pains shooting up and down it: Gielgud rails at his geriatry and expresses physical discomfort not just with wit but with a power that can only be described as full-bodied. Providence is entertaining too, for a while at least, because Langham’s commentary on the goings-on of his creations functions to some extent as a commentary on the way characters behave in a ‘mysterious’ Resnais film like Marienbad or even Stavisky …
Dirk Bogarde – in his figure-hugging, double-breasted suit – is a perfect incarnation of Langham’s derisive description of his son: a tailor’s dummy. With his eyebrow even more arched than usual and his striking, self-conscious hand movements, Bogarde seems almost to be satirising his own coldness and mannerisms. (Our sense that Claude will never be the man his father was has a double edge with Gielgud playing the latter and Bogarde the son.) David Warner, by comparison, is a disappointment as the illegitimate son/lover manqué. A shapeless sweater that comes down nearly to his knees exaggerates Warner’s beanpole physique amusingly but he doesn’t manage to do a lot with the improbably named Kevin – and Elaine Stritch isn’t nearly nuanced enough to get anything out of the mistress/mother doppelgänger. As Claude’s wife Sonia, Ellen Burstyn is more interestingly (and not entirely) unsuccessful. Burstyn’s not good at, and is certainly very uneasy, delivering Mercer’s high-toned bitchery but her emotional vigour breaks through occasionally. It makes her distinctively human in this company of actors and enables her to come to life as a character in her father-in-law’s novel in a way that eludes everyone else, except for the young Denis Lawson, in the small part of the Warner’s character professional footballer brother.
The last section of Providence takes place in the light of the day following Clive Langham’s disturbed night. It’s his birthday and the members of his family whom we’ve met in his imagination come to lunch to celebrate it with him and the couple (Peter Arne and Anna Wing) who keep house for the old man. In ‘reality’, Claude, Sonia and Kevin are so bland that I wondered for a while if Clive Langham was embarking on another flight of fancy, expressing negative feelings about the trio in a different way – this time to make them contemptuously innocuous. (Ellen Burstyn is hopeless here and interpreting a pitiably decent man doesn’t come easily to Dirk Bogarde.) On reflection, I don’t think this is what Resnais and Mercer are suggesting though I’m not clear what they do intend. Anyway, this coda is much too long and eventually tedious, except for a remarkable movement of the camera, from the sunny lunch table into the ominously darker trees and shrubs bordering the garden and back into the light. The film’s score is by Miklós Rózsa, a sometimes intriguing combination of his familiar Hollywood cadences, sub-Nino Rota details and suggestions of an incipient thriller. Incipience is as far as we get, though, in the thriller department.
10 July 2011