Screen:

...Janine is the character who has a picture of Beckett on the wall in her apartment, and into that apartment moves Jean, a politically ambitious intellectual whom Janine has lured away from his wife...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.TERBECK, JR...

...None of the photographs makes much sense to us by itself as the beam passes over them...

...But for Resnais himself, the allusion is completely appropriate, too appropriate...

...A decade ago he made a film called Je t'Aime, Je t'Aime, where the central character is a guinea pig in sensory disorientation experiments during which he has to lie inside a giant styrofoam brain...

...Although we can see through this lie, Janine apparently can't...

...Rene promptly tries to kill himself...

...The innovations in style with which Resnais began his career over twenty years ago have now become his own Krapp's last tape, a kind of endgame in which he is the only player...

...If we clear away the tangle of style with which the film has been baled together, we are left with a plot that is at the very least improbable and silly...

...But I wonder whether Resnais himself may not be, whether some of his more recent films aren't trying to communicate with us the same way...

...Then, some time later, after Janine has apparently switched careers and become an executive in the upper echelon of a huge textile firm, she fires Rene, who manages one of the firm's plants, on the very day she finds out the illness of Jean's wife was a hoax...

...Cinematic style has become for Resnais what language was for Beckett: a medium, like pure mathematics, capable of making statements only about itself...

...Actually there is another character in the early part of the film, Henri Laborit, who turns out to be the most ridiculous of all...

...In his great early films, Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad, this technique served as a way to explore memory and subjectivity, a way to open up movies to two crucial aspects of human experience with which movies had never really dealt before...

...Nonetheless, the shot serves as a little overture to the film as a whole...

...One day, as is inevitable, Jean's wife turns up on Janine's doorstep to say that she is mortally ill and wants Jean back to care for her and the kids until she dies...

...Where Beckett fits into this character's life, I cannot say...

...But now Resnais doubts what he once took for granted, and his doubt makes his films purely self-referring, gratuitous, self-indulgent...

...At the beginning of the film there is one shot completely detached from the narrative, a free-agent image, in which a flashlight plays over a collage of photographs...

...None of the solipsists in Mon Oncle d'Amerique is quite that far gone...

...In the film's early stages when we don't understand anything about these characters or their relationships, the juxtapositions of their lives and the vignettes from their backgrounds which Resnais creates are at least amusing...

...Some of this is amusing, too-at one point a rat is shown running through a miniature replica of Jean's apartment-until we realize that Resnais is only laughing out of one side of his face...

...This is a reaction brought on less by his own situation, perhaps, than by the confusion into which Resnais's film has plunged him...

...But the better we get to know and understand them, the more ridiculous they seem...

...Their main purpose has become merely to rationalize their own existence, their style...

...It concerns a woman named Janine (Nicole Garcia) who becomes personally involved at length with one man, Jean (Roger-Pierre), and professionally involved, briefly, with another, Rene (Gerard Depardieu...

...It's as if the artist in him were ultimately in thrall to a nineteenth-century positivist, someone who insisted that the investigation of all such experiences had to be put on a strictly scientific basis...

...We know from the credits, which tell us the film is ' 'based on works by'' Laborit, that he is not just a fiction like all the others...

...They just aren't people who wear well, who stand up to scrutiny...

...In that film as in Mon Oncle d'Amerique, Resnais gives the impression of trying to justify in the content of his film the free associations on which his style depends...

...But somehow Janine takes the wife's appeal at face value and altruistically forces Jean to leave her...

...In fact, some are at first unintelligible...

...In one of Beckett's novels-Malone Dies, I think-one character tries to communicate with another by tapping her on the head with his fist...

...The other side of his brain takes this hokum of Laborit's seriously...

...We can't even make out what their subject is...

...It is probably lichen on rocks, we realize a bit later...

...Although Resnais supplies for him, as for them, a few dramatizations of his youth, he quickly grows up to be a kind of French translation of B. F. Skinner, a stimulus-response theorist playing around with lab rats in a cage...

...Its own originality, the necessity of introducing such a style into movies, was justification enough...

...But in Mon Oncle d'Amerique the experiment has degenerated into a kind of perverseness, an obfuscation, a way to hide or disguise the poverty of Resnais's story and ideas...

...When he first began making films, that style needed no justification...

...For years Resnais has been trying to find some way to objectify the purely interior experiences of memory and feeling with which his first films deal...

...Since she is herself an actress, you would think she could recognize that the wife is engaging in a desperate pretense in order to get Jean back...

...Resnais's method has always been to present us with images-scenes or shots-that are out of sequence...