L'IMMORTELLE

Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of the most important postwar avant-gardists and founder of the noveau roman literary movement, made his cinema debut by writing the screenplay for the labyrinthine LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD. But one sitting with any of the films directed by Robbe-Grillet will reveal a visual artist not meant to be tethered to a keyboard. L’IMMORTELLE is the most accessible entry point into the sensual filmography of one of France’s most under-lauded auteurs; an evocative, hypnotic revelry of flowing bodies of water and naked flesh.

Unfolding in a fragmented, almost elliptical fashion, Robbe-Grillet places us in the shoes of a French lecturer, new to Istanbul and looking to find a connection with anyone who will let him. He meets a beautiful woman after viewing her from afar, hoping that she can relieve his aching loneliness, and a somewhat inexplicable, whirlwind romance unfolds. But it’s cut short after the woman vanishes into thin air and the surrounding townsfolk all claim never to have seen her. Feeling like a pawn in some unwritten, paranoid tale, the watcher begins to come apart at the seams until the woman suddenly reappears, only to die in a car accident before she’s able to explain her absence. Guilt begins to hook its claws into the man’s soul, as he attempts to reconcile the fact that inserting himself into the woman’s life may have very well contributed to her ultimate demise.

With its highly stylized camerawork and fragmented narrative structure, Robbe-Grillet's film is a cinematic arabesque that teases the eye with visual delights, yet sadistically confounds the viewer's expectations. It’s a rejection of the linear or easily explained that defines the journey of L’IMMORTELLE, and ultimately makes it so utterly fascinating.

“Alain Robbe-Grillet is the forerunner of a revolution more radical than Romanticism and Naturalism were in their time.” – Claude Mauriac

“Robbe-Grillet’s theories constitute the most ambitious aesthetic program since Surrealism.” – John Updike