If we look at “Life of Riley,” the last movie by French master Alain Resnais, as a farewell message, it is delivered with a lighthearted shrug. Accept that the material world might be made up, and then play with it. Have fun. Like kids putting on a play, lose yourself in a game of make-believe.
That is only a small part of Resnais’s artistic philosophy. He was a die-hard experimentalist and aesthete who spent his whole career trying to challenge the status quo and change the scenery while trying to show that the past and the present are one.
The film’s surreal humour shows the amused, far-sighted view of a very old man (Resnais died in March at the age of 91), whose sense of the absurd hasn’t turned bitter. Eric Rohmer, a contemporary of his who is more openly nostalgic, shows the same kind of wistful recognition that the Sturm und Drang of romantic passion is a long time ago and far away in his late films.
The main character, who isn’t seen in the movie but is very present in the minds of his friends and lovers, is a daring free spirit who, even though he has cancer, goes on vacation with a teenage girl to the Canary Islands and dies when he goes scuba diving without a guide. What a burst of energy! “He wanted us to stay young forever,” says Riley’s ex-lover Kathryn, played by Resnais’s wife, Sabine Azéma, in a tone that sounds a bit disapproving. She couldn’t keep up with him after a while.
Alan Ayckbourn’s 2010 stage comedy, “Life of Riley,” was turned into a movie by Laurent Herbiet and Alex Reval. It is the third film that Resnais made that was based on a work by this British comic playwright, whom Resnais greatly admired.
There are a lot of strange things and things that don’t make sense. The movie takes place in England, but it is directed in the style of a French boulevard comedy. Its tone and language are not tied to any country or culture. The story is set in the green Yorkshire countryside, which gives it a sense of place, but the mix of visual styles gives it a continental surrealist feel.
One running joke is that an animatronic mole keeps sticking its head out of the ground to watch the small domestic dramas of three couples rehearsing an Ayckbourn play from the mid-1960s called “Relatively Speaking.” When a cast member drops out of the show at the last minute, they look for a replacement and find their friend George Riley, who has just been told he has cancer and has only six months to live. The play would give him something to do in his last days, they all agree.
The play’s main character is the bored, drinking Kathryn, who is now married to Colin (Hippolyte Girardot), a glum doctor who is obsessed with being on time and collecting watches. She married Colin because he was the opposite of Riley. She said that Colin was “never young.” Kathryn is told to keep quiet about Riley’s illness, but as soon as she hears the news, she picks up the phone and tells everyone.