Eden and After, released in 1970, is probably Alain Robbe-Grillet’s weirdest most perplexing most experimental and most avant-garde movie. Surprisingly it actually made money. The 70s were different.
Eden and After was intended for theatrical release and was made in tandem with N. Took the Dice which was intended for French television. It’s sometimes assumed that the latter was simply Eden and After toned down for TV but it’s actually not the same film at all even though it shares huge amounts of footage.
There’s no point in talking about the script. The movie didn’t have one. Robbe-Grillet had charts of themes, ideas and images the movie would touch on and basically improvised from there. It’s like a series of episodes which may be connected in some way but the connections are enigmatic. Whether any of these episodes are real is up to the viewer to decide. Each of the five sections of the film would deal with twelve different thematic ideas. Don’t jump to the conclusion that the whole thing is a dream. That would be a wildly simplistic reading of a fiendishly complex film.
The movie starts with a rape, followed by a game of Russian roulette which ends in tragedy. This might sound like uncomfortable viewing but it’s not because it’s just a game and that’s obvious right from the start. There will be lots more games.
A group of bored university students hang out at the Eden cafe (which looks like a Mondrian painting turned into a building). They play elaborate games. The games become more elaborate. Perhaps the games become real, or perhaps they don’t.
Then we get a major change in the second section with the arrival of The Stranger (we will later find out that his name might be Duchemin or he might be the Dutchman). He’s an older man and the students seem inclined to follow his lead.
He gives Violette (Catherine Jourdan) a drug which he claims that he obtained in Africa. He calls it the powder of fear. It certainly induces fear in Violette. The Stranger then gives her the antidote. Since the antidote is pure water we might feel inclined to suspect that the powder of fear contained no drug at all – that Violette was merely responding to a kind of hypnotic suggestion.
Violette (Catherine Jourdan) owns a small but very valuable painting. It’s an abstract painting but it’s slightly reminiscent of houses in Tunisia. The action will later move to Tunisia, possibly. Her boyfriend suggest that they sell the painting to finance a trip to Tunisia by the whole group.
The third section moves the action to a huge factory. Violette seems to be pursued by some of the male students we saw earlier but we can’t be certain the actors are still playing the same characters.
The fourth section takes is set in Tunisia. Or maybe we’re not in Tunisia, maybe we’re in a movie about Tunisia that Violette was watching. We see the same actors and actresses we saw earlier but playing quite different roles. Everyone in this movie has a double.
In the fifth section we’re still in Tunisia where Violette is held prisoner. This section gives us an actual narrative or perhaps it tempts us into believing it’s an actual narrative. Violette is to be forced by her kidnappers to reveal the location of that painting. This finally leads us to an enigmatic ending which might explain everything or nothing.
An interesting feature of this movie is that there’s nothing green in it because Robbe-Grillet detested the colour green. He loved Tunisia because at the right time of year everything green was dead.
Catherine Jourdan was not supposed to be the star but Robbe-Grillet was so impressed by her that he kept giving her more screen time until she became in fact the star.
Surrealism is very difficult to pull off successfully. That’s the case in any medium but it’s especially true in film. If it’s done badly it seems merely silly, being bizarre for the sake of being bizarre. To be successful the viewer has to have a feeling that what seems meaningless actually does have a meaning, if only that meaning could be uncovered. It has to have a genuinely unsettling quality, as if the rules have been changed but there are still rules. It’s just that those rules are mysterious and unfathomable. Maybe the rules are unknown even to the creator of the work.
This movie also has a certain trippy quality, but it’s a million miles away from the trippiness of American movies of its era. There’s no influence of hippie culture. There’s no trace of psychedelia. The trippiness doesn’t come from crude camera tricks and it doesn’t feel like drug-induced trippiness. This is more cerebral, more like a genuine exploration of the elusiveness of reality than just an acid trip. There are drugs in the movie but to see the story as a drug-induced delusion would be as misleading as seeing it as a dream. The border between illusion and reality can be fuzzy, as can the border between reality and art. In this movie we’re not seeing a simulacrum of reality, we are inhabiting a work of art.
This is not quite surrealism but it’s certainly influenced by surrealism as well as being influenced by various modernist movements in art and literature.
One thing that’s interesting about this movie is that it appears to include a rape, several murders and several scenes of torture but in fact there’s no violence at all. All these acts of violence are so ostentatiously stylised and artificial that we are not for one second expected to see them as real. There’s one particularly brilliant scene in which a woman is tortured, but actually she is not being tortured at all. She is not harmed even slightly. The torture takes place in her own mind through the power of suggestion.
This is a very non-Hollywood movie that makes no concessions to realism. Modern viewers will likely take offence at all sorts of things here but none of these things actually happens.
Eden and After is reminiscent of Just Jaeckin’s Gwendoline (1984) in the sense that it employs sadomasochistic and fetishistic imagery in an obviously playful way. There are hints of sadomasochistic in Robbe-Grillet’s earliest films but it’s something that plays an increasing role in his later movies.
A particular highlight is a scene which brings Marcel Duchamps’ famous modernist painting Nude Descending a Staircase No 2 to life. It’s very cleverly done.
Eden and After is fascinating and hypnotic and it’s highly recommended.
The BFI have released this film on DVD and Blu-Ray. The disc includes a helpful audio commentary by Tim Lucas and also includes N. Took the Dice.
If you’re new to Robbe-Grillet’s movies I’m not sure that I’d start with this one. L’Immortelle, Trans-Europ Express, Successive Slidings of Pleasure, La Belle Captive and Playing with Fire are more accessible and more fun. They’re not quite as aggressively experimental and avant-garde.
I will also review N. Took the Dice.