You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! (2012)
Director: Alain Resnais
Country: France
Runtime: 115 min
Boris Nelepo (translated by Anton Svynarenko)" wrote:
Several famous actors, including Michel Piccoli, Pierre Arditi, Lambert
Wilson, and Mathieu Amalric, receive the same phone call informing them
that Antoine d'Anthac, a prominent playwright who would frequently cast
all of them, has passed away. Summoned to the late man's estate by his
well-mannered butler, they arrive to see Antoine's videotaped last will
and testament: speaking from the screen, the deceased asks his lifelong
friends to evaluate a contemporary take on his play, Eurydice, adapted
by a much younger company. As the projection begins, the spectators
involuntarily repeat the familiar dialogue, as if it were lifted out of
their shared favorite movie; so the performance begins on its own and
the spacious living room suddenly turns into a small-town railway café.
Orpheus starts his soft fiddle-scraping. He is about to meet Eurydice.
"The playwright's duty," Jean Anouilh, French dramatist, once wrote, "is
to produce plays on a regular basis. Actors must go out onstage every
night for the audiences who come to theatre to forget about death and
hardship. If one of the plays is found to be a masterpiece, well, so
much the better." Alain Resnais has stuck to this ethos for a couple of
decades now, enriching his already stellar back catalogue with some
brilliant autumnal work, but You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet is a veritable
masterpiece on par with his major accomplishments. Its audiences,
however, are unlikely to forget about death, since it is based around
it, as are both Jean Anouilh's plays that coalesce in Resnais' script:
the immaculate Eurydice and the oft-neglected Dear Antoine; or, The Love
That Failed. The latter was originally a story of a playwright who,
under circumstances not dissimilar to the premise of the film, invites
his friends to act out a play within a play. Here, the play in question
is Anouilh's Eurydice, blithely attributed to the fictional Antoine
d'Anthac.
The scene of characters arriving at Antoine's mansion bears a distinct
classical Hollywood tinge: the wind is howling outside, yellow, withered
leaves are strewn across the doorstep in a sublime frame worthy of
Douglas Sirk. Greetings come to the guests in the form of a Rivettian
intertitle: "As soon as they crossed the bridge, the ghosts did not take
long to present themselves" (Et quand il eut dépassé le pont, les
fantômes vinrent à sa rencontre). It is a direct quote from the French
version of Murnau's Nosferatu. The score, just as gentle and nuanced,
fades out before it climaxes: Resnais meant to recreate live music that
often accompanied silent movies. Anouilh's Orpheus and Eurydice,
incidentally, lament the fact that they did not grow up together, and
therefore missed out on a chance to watch Pearl White's star vehicles
side by side (specifically, Les Mystères de New York by Louis Gasnier
and Le masque aux dents blanches by Edward José). Their verdict is
wistful: "Now it's all gone. You can't bring it back. Cinema is painted a
different color, and the heroine is old."
Resnais deliberately omits this line, as if aiming to prove it wrong.
What is most captivating about You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet is how time
is regained in it; after all, it offers a vantage of a filmmaker who is
just twelve years Anouilh's junior and virtually the same age as his
Orpheus and Eurydice (the play was written in 1942). The fragile
Eurydice ponders, "So, if you happen to have seen a lot of ugly things,
they all stay with you, don't they? All the abominations you've
witnessed, all the people you've hated, even those you've tried to
escape, they're all there, neatly shelved?" It might be true, but it
also applies to all things beautiful. At one point, Anouilh began
staging his own plays, so Sabine Azéma, for instance, had an opportunity
to work under his direct supervision; the rest did not, yet none of
them are strangers to Anouilh's oeuvre, as they have participated in his
Eurydice productions and been strongly influenced by it across the
board. These things, too, remain within them. Their personal experiences
with the source material are engraved into their body language and
faces that Resnais frames with yet another retro device, i.e. the
iris-in, which darkens the edges around them. The movie screen always
responds to such enhancements, instantly adding more depth. Sometimes
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet shifts into documentary mode, when the
actors step out of their characters and become themselves and watch the
next generation of thespians reenact the memories of their youth in a
barely recognizable manner. New shapes replace old habits. Anouilh
himself turned to an ancient myth for inspiration. A poster of Resnais'
most enduring classic, Hiroshima, mon amour, is taped onto a railway
station wall as a reminder of the unbreakable bond between eras and the
immense span of the 20th century. Encapsulating this meticulous
consistency of time is the self-explanatory "It Was a Very Good Year"
Sinatra ever so tenderly croons over the closing credits. You Ain't Seen
Nothin' Yet, in a way, cinematizes the song's lyrics.
It features several couples of Orpheuses and Eurydices: Resnais'
fixtures, Azéma and Arditi, plus Consigny and Lambert, also frequent
collaborators. Each one instills their own inimitable charms: Azéma's
Eurydice is ghost-like and glow-eyed, while Consigny's is vulnerable and
ethereal. Let's also not forget about the young'uns from the rendition
they watch: it was, actually, staged and shot by Bruno Podalydès, whose
unrelated film also screened at Cannes as part of La Quinzaine des
réalisateurs. Resnais intended to delegate this video production to one
of his successors who would see beyond cinematic and theatrical
parochialisms. In Podalydès' production, the pendulum swings,
transforming the harp Orpheus' father is holding into a shopping cart
grate, café tables into barrels.
Once Antoine d'Anthac's living room has morphed into a set, Resnais
showcases his superlative staging skills and greatly developed instinct
for mise-en-scène. Take one of his saddest, most beautiful sequences:
Orpheus and Eurydice are alone, in hiding at a cheap hotel, sprawled on a
bed and surrounded by an empty room sans props or set decorations. The
only two objects in the void are a pair of spike-heeled shoes that cling
to each other just like the star-crossed lovers. Or take the grand
finale, truly of the we-ain't-seen-nothin'-like-it brand and unequalled
in this year's Cannes competition: Orpheus and Eurydice are locked in a
convulsive embrace, not allowed to make eye contact, filmed with little
to no editing. Clearly not above flashy techniques either, Resnais, on
one occasion, splits the screen in half, and lets the two versions
mirror one another. As Eurydice runs away from Orpheus, the halves
converge to compel both Orpheuses to face the mysterious Monsieur Henri,
a messenger of death or maybe Death himself.
This challenging part went to Mathieu Amalric who, unpracticed in such
challenges, had to reinvent himself from scratch and flee his
typecasting comfort zone. He first appears against a backdrop of an
eerie blue forest, mist curling all around: it is Resnais' haunting
vision of Hades that brings to mind Jean Cocteau's poetic claim of
mirrors being doorways to death. Looking into a mirror means watching
death do what death does, as your reflection is a chronicle of minute
changes you go through; it is very much like cinema, which led Jean-Luc
Godard to deem it "truth 24 frames per second." His dictum stemmed from
Cocteau's perspective. Later, in his Histoire(s) du cinéma, Godard would
quote Jean Epstein: "Death is making us promises via cinema." (Hereby I
briefly refer to the essential points of the brilliant André Habib's
article La mort au travail published in French in Hors Champ.)
Eurydice contrasts the banalities of human existence with eternal love
that is unattainable in life and therefore defined only by death and its
final freeze-frame (or, rather, freeze-life). How is Orpheus supposed
to live after Eurydice is gone? Resnais needed the other play not to
conclude his film with this question but to pose another. At the Cannes
press conference, he often referred to magic as his primary artistic
goal. To this end, he utilizes naïve, outdated special effects like
people disappearing into thin air and emerging out of it; the constant
glow about their silhouettes lends a dreamlike, hypnotic quality to the
images. The characters walk around as if in a state of trance, which,
weirdly, makes sense since acting indeed is very much akin to
sleepwalking. But once the play is over, it is time for the utmost
intimacy actors can afford: they shed their roles and reclaim their
selves. Just a moment ago, you were so passionate and eloquent as
Orpheus, King Lear, Ranevskaya––but the magic cannot last forever. Once
the limelight has fizzled, does the actor feel the way Orpheus does
after Eurydice perishes?
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet ends on an ambiguous note. As it turns out,
Antoine, still alive, has tricked his actors into coming there.
Afterward, however, he drowns himself in a lake. An aspiring actress
shows up at his funeral, trying not to catch the eyes of his
grief-stricken friends. Who is she? A character in search of a writer,
Eurydice paying respects to her creator? A starlet bidding adieu to the
playwright who launched her career in theatre? Most likely, she is
Antoine's ex, mentioned in passing at the beginning (note that the other
play is subtitled The Love That Failed). So, Monsieur Henri was right
when he told Orpheus their love would never last under life's pressures
and Eurydice would have left him, had she stayed alive. In this
soliloquy, Anouilh equates l'amour and la mort, the words phonetically
different by a single vowel. Antoine discovers it to soon become an
Orpheus as well.
In the final shot, we see yet another theatre adapting Eurydice. Resnais
connects past and future by an undying human ability to believe in and
genuinely ache for fiction. His flippantly self-aware framework is
multilevel: we watch actors playing other actors watching a videotape of
a play. And yet, no matter how many mirrors the filmmaker sets up and
how stylized the imagery comes out, the moment Orpheus and Eurydice see
each other for the first time, it all becomes real. What if he keeps
himself from looking back? What if they, after all, escape Hades
unscathed? Art is a reality in its own right. This illusion will live on
long after we are gone; this myth will prevail. Boy always meets girl.
Orphée est avec Eurydice, enfin!
Director: Helmut Herbst 
