Alais Resnais, a great, intellectual French director, teamed with British scriptwriter David Mercer in 1977 for his first English language film, Providence. The result was an extraordinarily inventive movie combining Resnais’s French surrealist sensibilities and Mercer’s wit. Some of you may be shocked to find me reviewing an English language film but consider the fact that it’s a French director and the “King’s English” (which is hardly recognizable in America as real English anyway).

Historical Background: Although Alain Resnais was a contemporary of the French New-Wavers, his training was more conventional and his content more intellectual. He did, however, share some of the editing techniques introduced during the New Wave, such as jump cuts and montage. Resnais made a big splash with his first two films, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Then came Muriel (1963), La Guerre est Finie (1966), Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime (1968), Stavisky (1974), Providence (1977), Mon Oncle d’Amerique (1980), Life is a Bed of Roses (1983), and Melo (1986). Thus, Providence came with Resnais at the height of his career and in full command of his skills as a director.

The Story: An aging novelist, Clive Langham (John Gielgud), is trying to complete his last novel while close to death. He is in pain and agony, taking medication, and drinking lots of wine. Consequently, his thought processes are less than clear and his dreams particularly fitful. Like many writers of fiction, Clive draws upon his own experiences and the people closest to himself in his own life for his characters and plot elements. Most of the first hour and fifteen minutes or so of the film consists of his thoughts, daydreams, and dreams by which he is constructing elements of his book out of a mix of recollections, fantasies, and unresolved issues centering on the members of his own family. Clive has two sons, one legitimate and the other illegitimate. The legitimate one, Claude Langham (Dirk Bogarde), is happily married to Sonia (Ellen Burstyn), though you would hardly imagine so from Clive’s mental fabrications about them. The illegitimate son, Kevin Woodford (David Warner), was officially acknowledged by his father as his biological son despite being born out of wedlock. Also playing a major role in Clive’s creative mental processes is his deceased wife, Helen Wiener (Elaine Stritch), who took her own life while dying of terminal cancer.

In Clive’s various fictional ruminations about his characters, built from his family members, one participates in a fanciful mercy killing of a wild man who is turning into a beast, two are involved in a trial in criminal court (one as prosecutor and the other as defendant), one son has an extramarital affairs with his sister-in-law, and the other son an affair with an older woman (“She looks like his mother. The boy must have an unconscious mind like everyone else,” Clive opines). Occasionally, the wrong character appears in a scene, only to be driven out of the scenario by the author. Still another character, Dave Woodford (Denis Lawson), a football player, periodically jogs through various scenes most inappropriately. Clive imagines his son demanding, “Did you create hell all these years just to have something to write about?”

The final half-hour of the film opens with streaming sunshine that signifies that Clive has survived the night. The new day is a special one since it will be his 78th birthday and his two sons and his daughter-in-law will be coming to visit. We see them arrive and visiting with their father but they are not at all like the nasty semi-fictional characters of Clive’s imagination. They indulge the old man, bring him gifts, ignore his abusive remarks, and generally coddle him. They enjoy a warm afternoon together sharing intimate thoughts. They talk openly and frankly with one another. At the end of the afternoon, Clive asks them to leave quietly without kissing or touching him so that he can enjoy the warmth of their love without a sense of it having come to a close.

Themes: The most profound aspect of this film is what it demonstrates about the creative process for writers of fiction. We see imagination at work, toying with material from real life, inflating it and distorting it, almost beyond recognition, to create the substance for the author’s latest novel. His children, his wife, his daughter-in-law all become bigger than life dramatic personages in the halls and corridors of Clive’s mind. The insights that this film provides into the creative process are quite hypnotic. Norman Mailer once described Providence as “the greatest film ever made on the creative process.”

We also see something about the tolerance that derives from love. This family inverts the usual parent-child relationship, to an extent, because Clive is more unconventional and intellectually uninhibited than his children. It is he whose eccentricities have to be tolerated by the others rather than a parent having to manifest patience toward an unruly child. Clive also has the more sensitive emotional life and is more easily wounded than his sons. Clive believes that Claude must blame him for his mother’s suicide, but Claude is actually more accepting of it than is Clive.

Then also, as with most films that deal with death, this film tackles the weighty issue of the values that give life meaning. Before the arrival of the children, Clive soliloquizes, “I remember, Molly [as though he were speaking to his deceased wife], when Claude was about fifteen, he said something I’ve always remembered. At dinner it was, and I was half-drunk as usual and you were dark with misery, as usual. Very grave and thoughtful he was, as usual: “Don’t you think father that one of the tasks of growing up is to discover a moral language, absolute in its way as a logical proposition?” Later, when the children arrive, during a soulful moment in the afternoon’s conversation, Claude is asked by his father to explain what he believes those values to be. Claude responds, “I don’t know if my values are correct or incorrect. They’re just the moral structures by which I can live: honesty, scrupulousness, discrimination, protectiveness, tenderness, and aversion to violence and the conscious practice of terror.” Clive guffaws at Claude’s idealism, insensitively asking the others, Sonia and Kevin, “He’s confusing private virtue with public justice; is he naïve or just a hypocrite?” We watch Claude’s face. Will he be hurt? Will he become angry at his father’s dismissive remark? He sits quietly, pensively for perhaps thirty seconds, then stands and lifts his wine glass to toast his father in the full flower of warm sincerity, “To my father on his 78th birthday! Live long father! We see, in this, Claude living two of his ideals: tenderness and protectiveness.

Production Values: This is one of those films where you don’t really understand how great it is until the last half-hour. The first 75 minutes or so are entertaining enough, but it takes a lot of concentration to follow what’s happening and it is not clear that it is leading anywhere very important. In the end, however, you understand that those 75 minutes provided the buildup that was necessary to the profound closing segment of the film. After wallowing in the decrepitude of Clive’s fevered unconscious, the morning dawns, the conscious mind awakens, and we see all that is best of human tenderness and protection of loved ones. The ending is truly transcendent.

Some of the sets for this film are downright other worldly. I particularly liked the ghostly white interior shots in a modern mansion with long corridors and cubic spaces. There’s a very surreal seashore setting and the final shots outside of Clive’s large home. This was a low budget picture, but Resnais and his cinematographer Ricardo Aronovich made it look gorgeous.

All of the performances in Providence are very, very strong but two stand out as among the best I’ve seen. Dirk Bogarde, as Claude, has exceptional timing in delivering his dialog and his facial expressions and gestures. I was impressed with him during the first 75 minutes, but after watching him perform what is essentially an entirely different character in the last 30 minutes, I was simply amazed. Bogarde’s resume includes such films as Quartet (1949), Doctor in the House (1954), Victim (1961), The Servant (1963), King and Country (1964), The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), and A Bridge Too Far (1977). Then there’s the performance by the veteran John Gielgud, who portrays agony as well as it can be expressed. His long career included appearances in such films as Julius Caesar (1953), Richard III (1955), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1956), Becket (1964), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), The Elephant Man (1980), Chariots of Fire (1981), Gandhi (1982), The Whistle Blower (1986), and The Portrait of a Lady (1996). Ellen Burstyn was convincing as Sonja as well. Her credits include The Exorcist (1973), Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), and Requiem for a Dream (2000). David Warner, who played Kevin, appeared in The Omen (1976), Time Bandits (1981), Titanic (1997), Planet of the Apes (2001), as well as Star Trek V and VI.

The musical score for this film is by Miklos Rozsa, with whom I’m vaguely acquainted by way of a few of his classical music compositions. He provides a sumptuous score, here, that really adds to the weightiness and grandeur of the film’s subject matter, especially in the final half-hour of the film.

Bottom-Line: Providence was once voted the best film of the 1970’s by an international jury of film critics and I have no desire to dispute that assessment. The seventies were the weakest decade in the second half of the twentieth century by a wide margin for international films and Providence is a real standout. It takes patience and concentration to get through this film to the big payoff at the end. Most viewers are likely to find that it takes multiple viewings to fully absorb this film’s content. Then again, many Resnais films are baffling, if not impenetrable. It’s worth the effort. Providence is in English and has a running time of 102 minutes.


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You might want to check out these other excellent films from France:

Alphaville
Amélie
The Battle of Algiers
La Belle et la Bête
Bob le Flambeur
Le Boucher
Boudu Saved from Drowning
A Bout de Souffle
La Cage aux Folles
Céline and Julie Go Boating
La Cérémonie
La Chèvre
Children of Paradise
Cléo from 5 to 7
Un Coeur en Hiver
Contempt
Cyrano de Bergerac
Delicatessen
The Dinner Game
Diva
The Earrings of Madame de . . .
Entre Nous
Eyes Without a Face
La Femme Nikita
Forbidden Games
French Cancan
Grand Illusion
Harvest
Hate
The Horseman on the Roof
Jean de Florette/Manon
The King of Hearts
Last Year at Marienbad
Life and Nothing But
Madame Rosa
A Man Escaped
Le Million
Monsieur Hire
The Mother and the Whore
La Nuit de Varennes
Pépé le Moko
Peppermint Soda
Playtime
Rififi
La Ronde
Round Midnight
The Rules of the Game
Le Samourai
Summer
A Sunday in the Country
The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe
Three Colors
Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Vagabond
Wages of Fear

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older