Although the translucency of form in La Guerre est finie appeared to mark a new departure, the film still had much in common with Resnais's previous features. Central to the film is still the struggle on the part of Diego to come to grips with his own past. Related to this, in a way much like Last Year At Marienbad, Diego seems caught in a pattern of repetition….

Diego's past, however, and this sense of repetition, are not simply matters of personal conjecture about the validity of some lost and private experience. They involve a public dimension as well….

In La Guerre est finie, however, for the first time in his career, Resnais's two main characters share a common past; and they are both engaged, in varying degrees, in an actual political activity. They can reminisce romantically about their first encounter in Italy and make tentative plans for a future life in Spain. In fact, if Diego seems caught by the repetitions of his political activities, by the end of the film (though it is teasingly inconclusive about this matter), that final slow dissolve might imply that the hitherto désengagée Marianne might be caught in them as well, perhaps left to carry on….

The split, then, which seeks to be resolved in La Guerre est finie is a split between the characters' private and their public lives. In this way, such distresses as the characters endure can in no way be described as neurotic. Their tensions are firmly placed in an actual place and time, and their attempts to deal with them are hopeful and, in terms of the film, realistic.

What seemed so fresh about La Guerre est finie when it first appeared was the bouyant beauty of the personal relationships and the way in which the greater simplicity of style allowed them to speak to us…. Certainly, it is a less complex film than Muriel, but beautifully handled. (p. 23)

Like La Guerre est finie, [Je t'aime, je t'aime] also has a compellingly charming character at its center plus the intermittent sense of many warm relationships. But the similarities end there. For one thing, unlike Diego, Claude Ridder is a man without a purpose, a man who lives (as Resnais himself has said) very much in the margins of life. This is one of the problems with the film, especially for a film supposedly concerned with time: Ridder is a man for whom time would be meaningless…. It is only the form of the film that thus lends an urgency to some of the moments of Ridder's life as we experience them for a second before they are flashed away again….

We might want to be concerned, as Ridder himself is, with whether he actually killed his friend Catrine when they were away in Scotland together; but basically, I feel, the film holds us back from this. The film works more like a conventional thriller…. The sci-fi format seems chiefly an excuse for the chronologically jumbled exposition of a simple little story which in itself is rather thin….

Like other Resnais characters, Ridder is caught up in a pattern of repetition. But with a difference. For Diego, as we have seen, the pattern was imposed from outside, the result of his public life. With previous Resnais characters, the pattern was almost totally internal, involving an obsession with some key moment of their past, generally a moment of idealized love, which they were attempting to reappropriate in the effort to understand. While this is partly true of Ridder, his will is not involved in the same way. Basically, Ridder seems caught up in the technological imperfections of his time-machine. He doesn't choose to go back into the past. He is sent back to live an arbitrarily chosen moment, chosen not by him but by the scientists in charge of him, and he gets stuck there…. Ridder cannot get free once he is thrown back into his own past experience. Nor can he make much sense of it. Nor can we.

If Ridder returns again and again to his concern with Catrine's death, he also returns to apparently trivial moments…. We also see him, sometimes very briefly, in marvellously warm and tender moments…. These moments provide the human center of Je t'aime and go a long way towards explaining my own patience with the film. At the same time, they do not provide the final justification for the form, a form that seems to present them in a willfully random way….

There appears to be a conceptual weakness in the construction of Je t'aime, je t'aime. Here we find a harsh collision between the desire to create characters that might engage us and the desire to create a structure which, as in L'année Dernière à Marienbad, would make a predominently musical appeal. In direct contrast to La Guerre est finie, Je t'aime springs more from an idea than from a character, and the two don't really jell. (p. 25)

Hiroshima mon amour works best as a kind of liturgy, as a refined assault upon our sensibilities that tends to numb the precision of our minds. Repeatedly, the film startles and surprises, offering local delights which the mind cannot immediately grasp. And throughout it all, there is such an atmosphere of charged significance—Hiroshima, the bomb, the war, lost love, middle age, desperation, anxiety. Yet these elements remain separate. Indeed, they are not intended to jell….

Somewhat similar to Night and Fog, Resnais' documentary meditation on the Nazi camps, the upshot of [his] rhetorical approach to the problem of characterization is that we get the sense on the human level that the characters are not in control of their own lives. The things they say do not necessarily relate to the things they do. Nowhere in the film do we get the sense of decisions being made. Things just happen. Like Nevers' first love: "At first we met in barns. Then among the ruins. And then in rooms. Like anywhere else."

At the same time, if these comments imply a generalized emotion as well as a personal lassitude, a fatalistic acceptance of things as they occur, the images accompanying them convey a much more particular emotion and create a more robust effect. In fact, the entire flashback sequence is full of truly magical effects, stunning artistic surprises. As we hear Nevers mention the ruins, we see her with her German lover posed against the gray sky with the wall of a ruin around them. It is held for the longest moment before slowly dissolving away….

These local moments are very much of the essence of Resnais's basically interpretative, directorial art. They seem much more at the center of the film's achievement than the much discussed notions of memory and forgetfulness, responsibility and desire. They provide the music to the script's libretto. In their delicacy and originality, they reveal where Resnais's creative interest lies. In comparison with the specificity of these aesthetic effects; the concern with time in the film seems theoretical and conventional—one might even say perfunctory. (p. 26)

For Resnais, there is no continuity within the joy of life. There are moments of happiness, of intensely heightened awareness, but these are doomed to vanish away. Worse that that, they live on in one's memory, making one miserable, haunting one with the sense of something lost….

In moral terms, in terms of what a work of art through its style affirms in life, the ending of Hiroshima mon amour is deeply pessimistic—hard set against life. The energy drains out of it as Nevers capitulates to a feeling of complete indecision, leading to an inability to act. The film ends on a scene not of rich ambiguity (as some people have claimed), but of moral and physical paralysis (against which may be contrasted the uncertain yet active ambiguity of La Guerre est finie)….

Like Toute la mémoire du monde, Marienbad sees our past life as a kind of confinement. Like Hiroshima mon amour, the characters in the film are uncertain about what really happened…. Throughout the film, the commentary often anticipates the appropriate images, which might seem once again like a kind of aesthetic teasing; but it also turns the whole film into a kind of dream.

However we might want to respond to them, the film hinges round three controlling images. First of all there is the hotel itself with its surrounding, shadowless gardens, where nothing ever changes, "without trees, without flowers, without growth of any kind." It is obviously a kind of geometric tomb into which the man keeps trying to lure the woman, to wander about forever, alone with him….

The film builds for us an experience where there are no actual characters and no natural life….

After the cold perfection of Last Year at Marienbad, Muriel seemed an exciting renewal of artistic energies. While it bears a strong stylistic and philosophical relationship to the films that preceded it, it offers us I think a far more satisfactory experience. It is demonstrably the most complex film that Resnais has yet made, even as La Guerre est finie remains the most accessible. (p. 27)

One of the real limitations of Marienbad is that its intentions seem to me to represent an invalid cimematic method. Films cannot analyze behavior; they can only show its outward manifestations…. To a large extent, Muriel invites us to respond in that way.

The film is dense in extraneous human details, details which are marginal to the main concern of the film but which nevertheless become part of its atmosphere. In a way that reminds me of Truffaut, these moments become part of the film's humanity. (p. 28)

More successfully than Hiroshima mon amour, more meaningfully than Last Year at Marienbad, the unity of Muriel is almost totally musical, quite literally so in the way that Hans Werner Henze's music serves to bind together the scattered fragments of Resnais's cinematic art…. Muriel seexs quite marvellously simultaneously centripetal and centrifugal, sending us outwards from the characters to create a sense of their actual environment, yet through the manner of this creation, giving us a sense of how the characters live their own lives.

Where, indeed, is the center of the town? What constitutes the center of any human character? This is it, the film seems to imply, this jumbled oscillation of expectation and memory, of the vain flight from the sense of past failure into the equally vain effort to recreate a more comforting reconstruction of the past. But without success. The characters in Muriel are as confined in their labyrinth of obsession and false memory as are the characters in Marienbad and the books in Toute la mémoire du monde. (pp. 28-9)

The film presents each of its characters as obsessed with a particular quest, whether it be a mate for a goat, the alleviation of guilt from an experience in Algeria, or simply the compulsion to prove that the past itself has been real….

If we consider Resnais's films as a whole, what are the qualities that most stay with us? For me personally, there is the feeling of uncertainty—not only the uncertainty of the world that his characters inhabit (as in Godard), but also the uncertainty of himself as an artist, a gnawing sense of inadequacy before the problems which he chooses to deal with in his films….

Cumulatively, the neurotic dread experienced by so many of Resnais's characters has to be related to Resnais himself—not necessarily Resnais the man, but Resnais the artist. There seems throughout his films a fascination with death and with various forms of self-destruction, plus a recurring passivity in the face of moral problems….

I suggested earlier that Resnais's inventiveness was very different from Godard's. Godard's seems thrust upon him by the many new things he wants to say. Resnais's, on the other hand, seems related more to the ghostly gardens of Marienbad. It seems more the desire to create forms of such beauty and authority that they will be eternal, like the statue in Marienbad…. For Resnais, filmmaking is editing…. He certainly is an editor of genius, and he has made films which are among the most challenging of our time. Yet there is something missing from his work. There is a sense of coldness, something non-committal—perhaps a sense of fear. (p. 29)

Peter Harcourt, "Alain Resnais: Toward the Certainty of Doubt, Part II," in Film Comment (copyright © 1974 Film Comment Publishing Corporation; all rights reserved), Vol. 10, No. 1, January-February, 1974, pp. 23-9.