[Providence] is a meta-film, a film about the making of films, a work of art about the fabricating of art works…. It is a film dependent more upon the mechanics of the medium than upon any simple mimesis….

Because a meta-film implies a simultaneous observation of the world and a meditation on itself, there is an unspoken tension, never resolved, within the work. Or, if resolved, it is only because the two functions have converged. The final scene of Providence is the only 'pure' scene in the film. We meet the real offspring of Clive Langham …, famous writer, liberated for the first time from his creative imagination. That liberation also implies the old man's death. The release of tension, on a structural level, comes from the fact that the spectator finally observes the author whose meditation is ended. If we use the mathematical construct of a topology, we have moved from the inside to the outside without, however, any change in the overall structure itself: Clive Langham has not changed personalities; his children are no better off in the 'real' world than they are in his mind; and his death is still inevitable. (p. 179)

Clive Langham is an old man dying and a creative writer creating. His vision contaminates everything else in Providence. His mind moves the other characters: they say the lines he gives them, they do what they are told. And the double role that Langham plays extends to all the other characters as well, so that they re-enact both his fantasies and his past experiences, even his nightmares, but never their own fantasies, experiences or nightmares. The result is that the spectator must constantly re-identify the characters in a symbolic way…. (pp. 179-80)

Resnais' Providence is an interesting meta-film, because it provides a kind of end-game to the form…. [It] is an example of montage as total découpage, the meta-film gobbling up the film itself, contaminating and finally eradicating the surface narrative, until the only thing left at the end of the film is the end of the film….

There are two ways in which Resnais interrupts the text and imposes his own point of view, both involving the other characters. One is essentially cinematic, the other is literary. There are brief shots, violent in their content, unnarrated … and unassimilated by the rest of the text, which punctuate the soap-opera scenes involving characters speaking to each other. The first such shot is of an apparent madman pursued by soldiers with machine guns…. The shot is totally visual, cinematic, undiluted by any act of interpretation within the film. This and other shots involving the herding together and shooting of old people on a football field 'belong', of course, to Clive Langham. They are images of old age and death: hurried and violent, because Langham cannot comprehend his own death; unnarrated, because they are creations of the imaginary, creations which pop up in Langham's mind, but over which his mind has no control. Expressed in their brute state, with no voice-over commentary, they represent Langham's point of view as the creator manipulated and totally alone with his fears.

Impending death as repose, both peaceful and desirable, is also expressed uniquely in terms of images. I refer here to the two times in the film when Resnais' familiar forward-travelling camera moves into and over the tops of green trees. These images also stem from Langham's point of view, but again his conscious creating mind has no control over them. They are startling, both for their colour and for their silence.

All other images in which Langham is not visually present, representing the various combinations of Claude Langham [and Sonia, Woodford, and Helen] … and comprising most of the film's screen time, are contaminated in terms of literature more than film…. Clive Langham, the writer, imposes his point of view on that of his children, in written form: he steals their dialogue. He feeds them their lines. In the beginning, this symbolic superimposition in the dialogue seems to function on a double level: the spoken lines have meaning both in terms of the other characters and in terms of the father meddling in their lives or composing lines for a novel. But, as the scenes repeat themselves and the spatial integrity of the film is lost, we realise that all scenes, except the final scene, are re-enactments of Clive Langham's past, with Claude and Woodford serving as stand-ins for Clive and Sonia and Helen substituting for the absent Molly, who committed suicide….

[The] face of … Langham is withheld for the first twenty minutes of the film, reminiscent of the withheld faces of the lovers in Hiroshima mon Amour (1959). The point here is that we associate point of view in film with a fixing of attention on characters' faces. We identify present tense, in a way, with the visual fixation on a face representing the whole body, the whole person…. [The] absence of that face (and the corresponding absence of a present tense) are crucial to the successful point of view superimposition, just as the lovers' faces being withheld in the long opening sequences of Hiroshima mon Amour established our identification, not with them but with their memories and reconstructions of Hiroshima and Nevers. (p. 180)

As Clive Langham comes full circle upon his failed past and as he approaches the inevitable death of the final scene, the doubling process breaks down. Characters begin to speak out of character, reversing each other's lines and, in some cases, speaking directly to the creator….

The breakdown in role-playing after that would be completely confusing if Resnais' visuals did not hold the scenes together by their repetition. Helen, supposedly Claude's lover, repeats Molly's words to Woodford. And Woodford play-acts Claude cursing his father, now played (ironically) by Claude….

Ingeniously, Resnais' repeated scenes function as a kind of revision process, a starting over for Clive Langham. The club scene, in which Sonia introduces Woodford to Claude, who has just tried in court to convict Woodford of murder, is Clive Langham's attempt as a writer/father to find a centre, to go back and begin again. Unfortunately, the decontamination process has already gone too far. Woodford says to Claude: 'What I'm searching for, Mr. Langham, is a moral language.' These were, in fact, Claude's words to his father, who now turns them back on his son in the composition process.

And suddenly the visuals break down as well. Claude and Sonia find themselves on the same patio as Helen and Claude, Helen and Woodford before them. In the background, the waves of the ocean are 'frozen', painted-on, a cardboard replication. As long as Clive Langham has control over the dialogue, the visuals in the scenes of conversation 'conform' to the composition. But his impending death, always expressed visually, destroys first the backdrop, then the foreground, from the frozen waves to the pursuit of Woodford….

The transition from this scene to the final scene is an intertextual allusion. Woodford's body is dumped into a bin. The camera moves in for a close-up on his hand. Cut to a close-up of Clive Langham's hand in the final scene, with the sound of cicadas on the soundtrack for the first time and the sun shining for the first time in the entire film. The allusion is, of course, to the cutting by psychic association in Hiroshima mon Amour, from the Japanese lover's sleeping hand twitching on the bed in Hiroshima to the dying German lover's hand, twitching on the ground at Nevers. The sound of cicadas is also a reference to Hiroshima mon Amour, in which the same sound, the first 'natural' sound in the film, punctuates the first time that we see the lovers' faces, all sound accompanying their memories and reconstructions up to that point having been stylised sound: voice-over commentary of a recitative nature or discordant modern music….

The resolution to this meta-film goes something like this: we finally see Clive Langham out in the open, objectified on his birthday and death-day. And, curiously, we as spectators assume the role of final creator. We now know the truth about the children that Clive Langham never knows: that he is loved, has been loved all along, and the only limits to that love are the terms that he himself has dictated. All the 'torture' of the rest of the film is exiled to the level of pure fiction, the creator duped by his own creation.

What prevents the film from being a simple 'it-was-all-a-dream' resolution, too facile a conclusion for Resnais' tastes, is that there are real victims in this story. The missing Molly remains missing, whether by actual suicide or accidental death. And Claude remains the estranged son of a prodigal father, no matter whose fault it is. Indeed, in retrospect (meaning that one has to see the film at least a second time, and maybe more, to piece it all together) Claude's is the most crucial role in the film, since his behaviour is the constant reminder of Molly, the mother. We are only given one glimpse of Molly in the film: a photograph. The photograph is of a woman we know in the film as Helen. Clive Langham's failure on both fronts (he was a womaniser in the marriage and he neglected Molly when he wasn't chasing women because he was writing) is photo-clear at the end. The sexual entanglement he has tried to create between Sonia and Woodford or between Claude and Helen never succeeds, precisely because incest prevents it from succeeding. Clive Langham's ultimate failure is that he never resolved his wife's death before his own. And he never re-created Molly in the fiction of his composition.

As film, Providence ends with the creator within the film becoming a character, a dying character at that. His point of view accedes to our own, and we have information/knowledge about him and the other characters that he will never have. As such, there is a kind of deflation or release of tension in this last scene. We are like the critics who only find out about a writer's life (and his intentional fallacy) after his death. But as meta-film, Providence has a very different ending. The intertextual allusions to Hiroshima mon Amour do cinematically what Clive Langham's comments about style in the dialogue have done throughout the film: they send us to Resnais, not Clive Langham. Product of a double-bind, the meta-film is a way for the director to go on creating, even while the failed artist dies within the film. Stated that way, Providence tells us a great deal about the enigmatic and usually silent Alain Resnais. (p. 181)