Trans-Europ-Express (1966)
Directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet

Film Review

The emergence of the Nouveau Roman in French literature of the 1950s was seen by some as a precursor to a similar revolution in the art of filmmaking.  The arrival of the French New Wave at the end of the decade certainly had an impact but the extent to which this resulted in the birth of the anticipated Nouveau Cinéma is a highly contentious issue.  Of the four figures most strongly associated with La Nouvelle Vague, only two (Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard) can legitimately claim to have shifted the art of cinema into new territory.  The others (François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, together with most of their lesser known cohorts on the Cahiers du cinéma) were content merely to develop their own personalised kind of film within the rigid framework of conventional cinema.  In fact, it was not the New Wave innovators, but rather two of the most influential instigators of the Nouveau Roman - Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras - who came closest to achieving the expected cinematic revolution, and whilst most of their film work is all but forgotten today, their influence endures, with many of today's auteur filmmakers similarly committed to the project of extending the boundaries of cinematic expression.

It was right at the start of the French New Wave that Alain Robbe-Grillet first had an impact on cinema, through his remarkable collaboration with director Alain Resnais - L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961).  Although Robbe-Grillet only contributed the screenplay to the film, Resnais insisted on sharing the creative ownership of the film with it, and with good reason.  The film - a spectacularly haunting evocation of mortality and lost love - contains (in graphic form) many of the stylistic tropes that underpin Robbe-Grillet's idiosyncratic literary art, most notably an absence of logic and objectivity, with plot and character both conspicuous by their absence.  Impossible though it is to pin down with any precision, Marienbad is a mesmerising masterpiece and its unique oneiric artistry is what it made it an international hit.  This success allowed Robbe-Grillet to begin directing his own films, and his equally unfathomable first feature L'Immortelle (1962), similar to his Resnais collaboration with its dreamlike interweaving of memories and fantasies, won him the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc.

Robbe-Grillet then went on to direct his most commercially successful film, Trans-Europ-Express.  The immense popularity the film enjoyed may have been largely down to its choice of lead actor, Jean-Louis Trintignant, who had recently acquired international fame through his participation in Claude Lelouch's Oscar winning arty confection Un homme et une femme (1966), the best-known film to have been made in France in the 1960s.  In the first of four films directed by Robbe-Grillet, Trintignant gets to appear as both himself (a man in a crowd) and a first-time drugs smuggler in the film-within-the-film.  The idea of a film showing another film in the process of being imagined into existence was hardly a new one.  Julien Duvivier had already pulled this off successfully over a decade before with La Fête a Henriette (1952), and this was remade two years before Robbe-Grillet's film by Hollywood director Richard Quine as Paris When It Sizzles (1964).  Trans-Europ-Express is a pretty blatant steal of Duvivier's film, but whereas Duvivier's objective had been to critique the staid filmmaking conventions of his day, Robbe-Grillet uses this as an opportunity for wild experimentation, in effect building on the meta-cinema concepts introduced by Federico Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard in their 1963 offerings 8½ and Le Mépris.

Trans-Europ-Express begins with three people on a train starting to thrash out ideas for their next film.  These three are Alain Robbe-Grillet himself (playing the film's writer-director), his real-life wife Catherine Robbe-Grillet (as the coldly analytical production secretary) and small-time Belgian producer Paul Louyet (effectively impersonating himself).  They hit upon the idea of making a film about an inexperienced drug smuggler, and after dismissing a jokey comic book treatment, they settle down and bend their minds to the task of putting together a coherent narrative.  A chance sighting of Jean-Louis Trintignant leads them to cast the actor in the lead role without a moment's hesitation.  Things get off to a promising start but it isn't long before the plot starts to go off the rails, and every time one plot inconsistency or weakness is resolved, another surfaces further down the track within minutes.  Coming up with a flawless plot seems to be as fraught as trying to fix a leaky water pipe made out of colanders.

A keen proponent of S&M, Robbe-Grillet's thoughts seldom stray from his lurid erotic fantasies, and so as well as having to carry a ramshackle thriller intrigue with dodgy drugs dealers JLT is called upon to pay frequent visits to a willing prostitute to indulge his taste for kinky sex.  Marie-France Pisier's seductive presence alone justifies these tastefully erotic digressions but at the cost of weakening the film's coherence even further - the point presumably being that an author's worst enemy is his susceptibility to auto-arousal.  Inevitably, the film-within-the-film ends in a virtually identical manner to À bout de souffle (1960), Jean-Luc Godard's more restrained attempt at film deconstruction - with the hero being betrayed by his gorgeous bedfellow, cornered by the police and then dying - as comically as possible - when a bullet hit him.  The film's author seems mighty pleased with himself when he and his colleagues descend the train, apparently oblivious to the monumental train-wreck of a narrative that he has just spent the past few hours mulling over.

Beautifully filmed in the lushest of lush black-and-white, Trans-Europ-Express has the  seductively stylish realist sheen that we associate with the early Nouvelle Vague era, the location exteriors (especially those shot at night) serving to make the town of Antwerp the most interesting character on screen (every other character - even JLT's - is laughably two-dimensional, more by design than accident).  The film's rich aesthetics appeal to our artistic sensibilities but they can scarcely hope to deflect from the lack of narrative substance.  Au contraire, these are mischievously employed to draw our attention to this seeming defect, continually reminding us that what we are watching in the film-within-the-film is pure phony-baloney, a shallow attempt at mass entertainment that is as flimsy as a ten-storey house of cards.  The ease with the plot becomes derailed, the clumsy attempts to patch up the narrative, the implausible behaviour of the characters and ultimately the film's staggering inability to differentiate between farce and tragedy...  Robbe-Grillet is positively revelling in the sheer pointless absurdity of trying to construct a coherent film narrative on conventional, linear lines.

By contrast Robbe-Grillet's own film, Trans-Europ-Express viewed in its entirety (as distinct from the B-movie monstrosity created within the film), is the more robust track that cinema should be following.  What Robbe-Grillet argues for is the drastic demotion of fictional conceits - plot and character - to mere incidentals (MacGuffins as Hitchcock would call them), thereby allowing the artist to focus on the real substance of the film.  Like the Nouveau Roman, this New Cinema requires that the consumer is as actively involved in the creative process as the instigating author - it is the spectator who must work to interpret what the author offers if the film is to have any deeper meaning. Having demonstrated - with the typical in-your-face bravado of a true genius - the futility of creating a fictional narrative, Robbe-Grillet then went on to show how hard it is to construct real personal narratives in L'Homme qui ment (1968), arguably his most profound and innovative film.

Film Synopsis

A writer-director meets up with his film producer and production secretary at Paris's busy Gare du Nord and together they take the Trans-Europ Express to the Belgian town of Antwerp.  During the trip, they discuss their next project and attempt to thrash out a storyline, inspired by a chance sighting of the actor Jean-Louis Trintignant.  In the proposed film, Trintignant will play a rookie drug smuggler named Elias who is tasked with shipping a consignment of cocaine from the French capital to Antwerp by train.  On his arrival in the Belgian town, Elias will meet up with a succession of shady-looking contacts who use this first assignment to test his loyalty and suitability for this line of work.  Elias whiles away his empty hours by roaming the town and hooking up with a very desirable prostitute named Eva.  Sessions involving bondage and simulated rape are all that Elias requires of Eva, and she agrees to this willingly.

Elias finally gets to meet his number one contact, and having been shown to be a dependable smuggler, he is directed back to Paris with another lucrative package.  Before he goes, Elias pays Eva one last visit, only to discover that she has betrayed him to the police.  After strangling the prostitute whilst enacting one of his erotic fantasies, Elias goes into hiding, but cannot resist being lured to a strip club to watch an erotic performance by a woman bearing a striking resemblance to Eva.  All too late Elias realises he has been caught in a trap.  As the police move to arrest him his contact shoots him dead.  The authors of this fictional intrigue appear satisfied with their work by the time they return to Paris.  Not far from them, Jean-Louis Trintignant can be seen embracing a young woman who looks uncannily like Eva.