Je t'aime je t'aime (1968)

Second viewing; first seen on November 22, 2005

Title's literal translation: I Love You I Love You

A failed suicide agrees to be the subject in an experiment involving time travel. He is expected to go back one year, during one minute, but there are complications and he gets trapped in a succession of snippets of his past. The main focus is his relationship with a depressed woman, for whose death he feels somewhat responsible.

As any art form gets older, the tendency to self-reference is inevitable. You see, film is by itself a time machine; what we see here is an allegory of cinema, and of the modern ability to watch films repeatedly (like I just did). The kind of play with repetition in which this film engages is somewhat derivative from works such as the novel The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares, and previous films from I Love You I Love You's director, especially Last Year in Marienbad, by Alain Robbe-Grillet. While not as bad as I first thought, I again failed to see what the big deal is with this film. Call me a conservative, but the formal apparatus was distracting and mostly perfunctory; a more direct exposition would perhaps have resulted in a better film, yet, alas, still not good enough, whence the need to worsen it so it could seem better to the impressionable ones. Anyway, it is curious as a sign of the times, and in the plotline too, with characters that reflect the post-modern age in its beginnings; and they surely hit a bull's eye with the casting of the female lead, judging from her biography.

Rating: 31 (up from 18)