Watch Eden and After For Free

The Worst Film Ever

I'll tell you why so serious

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Director, Alain Robbe-Grillet clearly had a liking for young ladies in very short mini dresses and their being chased and sometimes caught and sometimes more. Well he films this so beautifully and has such a beautiful lead in Catherine Jourdan that it is hard to object too much. I understand this was inspired by composer Schoenberg's original twelve tone technique and so there are a number (twelve actually) elements of narrative with repetition but I'm not sure I'm too interested in all that. The film is wonderful to look at, at all times and has some sort of narrative flow but it can be an effort to stay with it because nothing ever seems to be resolved or made very clear. The director, of course wrote Last Year at Marienbad and the pretty young Jourdan appeared with Marianne Faithful in, Girl on a Motorcycle.

I suppose an argument on whether or not "Eden and After" is a load of pretentious twaddle or a film with real substance could go on forever, but whether or not there is more than the typical late 60's/early 70's drugged-out pseudo-intellectualism here is irrelevant. I don't think Robbe-Grillet's intention is to make a 'Grand Statement' of any sort, "Eden and After" seems interested mostly in asking questions and provoking a response from the audience, as well as in its aesthetic sensibilities."Eden and After" has been described as a highbrow soft-core flick, not only in another IMDb comment but elsewhere as well, and it's a fair enough label- many of the images here, particularly in the last forty minutes of the film are certainly erotic, or at least obviously were to Robbe-Grillet. Robbe-Grillet has achieved genuine sensuality with his imagery. It's not porn, there's none of the visceral satisfaction of that sort of thing, it's actually evocative enough to earn the 'erotica' label, although the film certainly has ambition beyond that.Indeed, dismissing this as a skin flick is a bit moronic; there's so much more here. It's a dark, captivating, occasionally nightmarish, and very interesting film. The sound mixing here is absolutely superb, much like it was in the only other Robbe-Grillet film I've seen so far, "Trans-Europ-Express", and the cinematography stunning, especially after the film shifts focus to Tunisia in its final act. This was Robbe-Grillet's first color film and the opportunity is not wasted- everything from the minutest detail of the design to the cast's wardrobe is a carefully-orchestrated visual extravaganza of bold colors, often used very well in the film to emphasize a point."Eden and After" is something special, and whether or not you like it you have to admit that it's a unique experience and that much of the imagery is jarring and very effective. For me it was one of the most intense and involving viewing experiences of my life and is already one of my favorite films, having viewed it twice in a row, something I have rarely ever done before. I can understand disliking this one, but you have to give it credit at least as an aesthetic achievement.

I knew of novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet chiefly by virtue of his script for Alain Resnais’ art-house masterpiece LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD (1961; which I intend to revisit in tribute to the author). Eventually, I became aware of his own films as a director via a thread on “The Latarnia Forums” – which, back then, had intrigued me a great deal and, in fact, was highly pleased to acquire three of them a few months ago. Unfortunately, the prints were incredibly murky – so I kind of lost my enthusiasm and it’s only now, in honor of his passing, that I made a concentrated effort to stick with them! However, my first encounter with these titles proved a disappointment: as I said, the picture quality left a lot to be desired – but, frankly, so did the film itself! Judging by the celebrated Resnais work, I knew I’d be in for an oblique and possibly multi-layered piece – however, to be honest, I found it made little sense and that it was generally weird for weirdness’ sake! In fact, if I had to compare Robbe-Grillet’s style here with that of contemporaneous film-makers, I’d say this is Godard meets Antonioni meets Jodorowsky!; that, in itself, would sound like a most interesting proposition to some…but, I assure you, the film is a bit of a bore despite plenty of nudity (the writer-director seems to have a thing for sadomasochism, as can also be seen from TRANS-EUROP-EXPRESS [1966]) and a stunning-looking heroine in Catherine Jourdan (sporting cropped blonde hair).The plot, such as it is, has to do with a group of disaffected students who are shown a way out of their ennui (via a concoction he offers) by a man they meet at a café (the Eden of the title); Jourdan is supposed to have a night-time tryst with him at a factory but, on arriving for the appointment, she is intimidated by some of her fellow students and finds the man dead! Taking a clue from a postcard of an Arabian town found in the stranger’s pocket, Jourdan gets mixed-up in espionage (the MacGuffin in this case being a valuable missing portrait), games of a sexual nature, drug-induced hallucinations and murder; eventually, we come full circle and the story returns to the Eden and the arrival once again of the stranger...

EDEN AND AFTER is the kind of movie that tends to get overrated by some. Robbe-Grillet is a famous French intellectual and artist and that immediately sends some people Looking For Significance. In fact, though, EDEN is basically a softcore flick covered with spoonfuls of Sixties pretension. I like that kind of thing, once in awhile, and so I basically liked it, but it's hardly anything *more* than that.A group of bored students are wiling away the hours at a club called "Eden", doing silly things like staging pseudo Russian roulette encounters, when suddenly they meet up with a mysterious stranger who offers them a way out of their boredom, with descriptions of Africa and a powder called something like "powder of fear". The leader of the gang (the quite lovely Catherine Jourdan) takes the powder, and the rest of the movie might be interpreted as her hallucination: rampant s&m imagery, tribal dances in the Middle East, her friends now seen as enemies, and a decrepit factory belching out odd effluent.It doesn't make sense, I'm not even sure it's supposed to make much sense, Robbe-Grillet or no Robbe-Grillet. There's a lot of Sixties "experimentation", and that already seems very dated nowadays --but it can be approached as camp, I happen to have a small weakness for the style and generally enjoyed it. There's a lot of silly playing around with the sound in particular, as well as a lot of self-important running about and the Introduction of Very Important Symbols (the factory, for instance, although it gets weirder).This kind of thing can get bogged down pretty quickly, and indeed like most movies of this type it could've stood 15 to 20 minutes cut out of it. It helps, though, that there's plenty of gratuitous nudity and generally trippy imagery about, to keep it moving. R-G had a basic, but striking color sense, and seemed particularly fond of bold colors over white to make a statement. Ms. Jourdan is beautiful and we get to see a lot of her.I would describe this as a highbrow softcore flick, and if that description perks your interest you should check it out. But I wouldn't waste my time looking for depths that aren't there.