It’s a funny thing about the late novelist-filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet: as the screenwriter of Alain Resnais’ experimental classic LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (L’année dernière à Marienbad; 1961), Robbe-Grillet cemented his place as a pioneering member of the 1960s French New Wave, yet his self-directed films, which were every bit as odd and discordant as MARIENBAD, tend to resonate more with horror-exploitation film fans. That includes EDEN AND AFTER (L’Eden et après; 1970), a wildly experimental, albeit extremely bloody and erotic, art film that was quite popular with mainstream audiences in France.
The primary setting is Eden, a college situated in an art deco space comprised of maze-like glass partitions. It’s here that a group of bored students partake in games whose nature is revealed in the opening scenes, in which a young woman is forced lie on a table and be gang raped by several of her classmates. Other such “games” include female students being cajoled into caressing jagged shards of glass and the snorting of a powder that inspires bloody hallucinations.
The games grow increasingly elaborate, stretching outside Eden’s confines to a secluded factory. There, one of the students, the vivacious miniskirt wearing blonde Violette (Catherine Jourdan), is stalked by her classmates and discovers the corpse of a mysterious individual (Pierre Zimmer) known to the students as Duchemin (Dutchman)—only to find that, on the following morning, none of those classmates remember who Duchemin was. Furthermore, the corpse Violette saw is nowhere to be found, with the sole trace of Duchemin’s existence being a postcard depicting a house in Tunisia.
This leads to Violette recalling a film shown in the Eden cinema depicting her and her classmates afoot in Tunisia. In this dusty sunbaked environ the gang enacts a drama involving torture, confinement, suicide and a desperate hunt for a valuable painting. Amid all this insanity, Violette discovers a woman (Eva Luther) who looks exactly like her, and with whom she initiates a lesbian relationship.
What precisely is happening? I wouldn’t advise pondering that question too deeply, as the film, in true Robbe-Grillet fashion, is deliberately impenetrable, with a narrative that teases the viewer unmercifully and eventually doubles back on itself (with the final scenes suggesting a time travel rationale), rendering any perceived “meaning” completely moot. Perhaps Robbe-Grillet was simply looking for an excuse to get his leading lady into as many skimpy outfits and/or erotic situations as possible, or maybe he just wanted a trip to Tunisia.
The film, for all that, is quite enjoyable. It has the verve and pacing of an exploitation flick, with female nudity kept omnipresent and the violent and/or sexual thrills occurring at a rate of one every few minutes. Also, as visualized by cinematographer Igor Luther (THE TIN DRUM), the film (Resnais’ first color production) looks gorgeous, which together with the ominous and enveloping sound design of Michel Fano suggests there’s something here that’s worth pondering.
The Redemption Blu-ray release of EDEN AND AFTER contains an extra film, N. TOOK THE DICE (N. a pris les dés…; 1972), a never-aired TV movie comprised primarily of outtakes from EDEN AND AFTER that radically transforms the material. It is, in short, an entirely different film, but definitely not a better one.
Vital Statistics
EDEN AND AFTER (L’eden et apres)
Como Films/Slovensky Film/Satpec
Director: Alain Robbe-Grillet
Producer: Smay Halfon
Screenplay: Alain Robbe-Grillet
Cinematography: Michel Fano
Editing: Bob Wade
Cast: Catherine Jourdan, Pierre Zimmer, Richard Leduc, Lorraine Rainer, Sylvain Corthay, Juraj Kukura, Jarmila Kolenicova, Catherine Robbe-Grillet, Francois Gervai, Ludwik Kroner, Igor Luther