MELO
With Andre Dussollier, Sabine Azema, Pierre Arditi, and Fanny Ardant.
In the second cadenza, near the end, a few years after the suicide of Romaine–who began a brief, secret affair with Marcel the day after he delivered the above-mentioned monologue–her husband and Marcel’s friend, Pierre, recites to Marcel by heart, the letter that she wrote to him before drowning herself in the Seine.
Twenty-five years later, while one can certainly single out Resnais features that are flawed (Je t’aime, je t’aime, L’amour a mort) or relatively minor (Stavisky, La vie est un roman) or both (La guerre est finie), only two of Sontag’s complaints seem to hold up: Resnais’ films are all synthetic, and they lack directness of address. The same could be said for the collected fiction of Henry James, William Faulkner, and Jorge Luis Borges.
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Perhaps the most dated aspect of Bernstein’s work for contemporary French tastes can be summed up in one word: psychology. As Resnais has pointed out, the three leading characters in Melo are all neurotics; and the compulsive rhythms and obsessional themes in their dialogue might be described as the point at which Bernstein’s fascination with their psychology meets Resnais’ interest in music. In the 1929 theater program for Melo, Bernstein wrote that he regarded the play as “the most complete expression of my thought and sensibility” and “a synthesis of all the themes that I have become attentive to”; the role played by music in sublimating (as much as expressing) the extreme emotions of the characters and their repressed psychological states surely has a lot to do with this synthesis.
- Pierre Arditi (Pierre) and Fanny Ardant (Christiane). The quartet of Dussollier, Azema, Arditi, and Ardant appeared in Resnais’ two previous films, La vie est un roman and L’amour a mort–movies whose exposure in the U.S. has been so limited that the above classification of them as “relatively minor” and “flawed,” respectively, should be regarded as interim judgments at best. (Most of Resnais’ films improve greatly with repeated viewings; after three or four looks at Melo over the past year, I feel I’m only beginning to make its acquaintance, but there’s no question that each time it grows considerably.) The fact that Resnais has used these four actors three times in a row, and quite differently each time, can be interpreted two ways: as another example of the arbitrariness of his initial premises, or, conversely, as one aspect of the firmness and confidence of his technique, which partially depends on working with actors whose capacities are well known to him. Considering the extraordinary ensemble acting in Melo, which was shot in a little over three weeks, it is worth remarking that this work was preceded by another three weeks of rehearsals.
