Private Fears in Public Places (2007)

Legendary French filmmaker Alain Resnais is one of those directors who is perceived as being masterful and “good for you” and, as a result, has been ignored by me. I’m not championing this viewpoint, but there it is. I’ve read Hiroshima Mon Amour’s DVD box probably a dozen times and have yet to take it out. The rest of Resnais’s work is even less familiar to me. He was always one of the Men of Film that I was always going to catch up with.

I finally caught a Resnais film, Private Fears in Public Places, the 84 year old director’s most recent, and one of the most acclaimed of last year. Truthfully, if I had been paying more attention to my Netflix queue, I probably wouldn’t have seen it this soon. But I wasn’t, so I did. And I’m glad that that oversight forced me to correct a larger one. The first thing that should be said about Private Fears is that it’s not some crusty “brilliant” movie that puts you to sleep in 20 minutes. It’s alive, romantic, and spry, an elder master showing the kids how it’s done.

Like most people in their twenties who see more movies in a week than most see in a month, I normally have an aversion to American romantic comedies. Most, which are generally labeled as “chick flicks” are desperate sexist parables that might as well carry a MATE! MATE! MATE! sign outside the theatre lobby. The films generally portray women as mindless nobodies who will remain nobodies until the perfect bland, hunky guy fucks them into true being, and, of course, marries them. Their life is to find a man to be subservient to, and these are supposed to be for women? Most romances seem to be deathly afraid of melancholy that doesn’t entail wolfing a pint of ice cream with your best girlfriend. True melancholy, the kind that most people wear like a transparent shawl, is rarely touched upon in American romances.

That shawl envelopes Private Fears in Public Places, which plays, and I know the big critics would kill me if they read me, like a blending of Love, Actually and the Alan Rudolph of Choose Me. Like those films, Private Fears is a roundelay, here involving six people who are intertangled in ways they don’t fully comprehend, and their sometimes desperate lunges at romantic fulfillment. The film doesn’t dry hump you like the last half of Love, Actually with climax after cloying climax, and it doesn’t wear its kookiness on its sleeve like Rudolph tends to, the film simply is. Resnais understands that someone can be unhappy without comprising their dignity and that they can be unhappy BECAUSE they don’t compromise their dignity. Resnais’ conviction in this simple observation is refreshing, and ensures that little actually happens in Private Fears in Public Places, but the little that does happen means everything.

Resnais, like Altman, brings with his age the best of both worlds: the wisdom and confidence of his experience and the hunger and pure cinema intoxication of a man much younger. The film, even if it were nothing else, is a remarkable, enjoyable bit of visual craft. Private Fears is set in the Paris of its inhabitants’ dreams: otherworldly, perfect, like a postcard or a fairy tale. Resnais’ camera always seems to be exactly where it should be, the work is exuberant without showing off. There’s an extended scene, really a breakup scene, that is shot from the ceiling of the apartment, and while you praise the technique, you can’t help but note that it’s the loneliest, most desolate way to film the scene. Resnais also has a habit of framing his characters in transparent cages, a succinct, unpretentious metaphor for the reason we see these kinds of movies to begin with, and the reason we should celebrate them when they’re this good.

★★★½

Posted on January 18th, 2008 in 2007, Reviews, Comedy, Drama |

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