5.2 Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968) "Sniffing for Purpose"

Time Babble

Hello dear Babbler and welcome to our next (or previous?) episode.

This is also, rather excitingly, the first episode recorded live and completely uncut. Gasp! at our grammatical heresies. Swoon! over our incoherently repetitive and rambling digressions. Thrill! at the moment one of us needs to take a ‘Time Babble comfort break’.

This week we bring you Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968) directed by Alain Resnais. Our film is all about Claude (the Riddler) Ridder, who is having a rough time of it. He’s just survived a suicide attempt, so naturally his next logical step is to volunteer for a top-secret time travel experiment run by scientists who have clearly skipped their ethics classes.

‘What is the scientist's plan?’ we hear you cry. Well, the simple plan is to send Claude back in time for exactly one minute to relive a peaceful memory. ‘Ooh exciting!’ we hear you exclaim.

Instead of one minute however, the fleshy time machine malfunctions (shocker), and Claude is stuck in a loop of existential dread, romantic regret and scenes that feel like someone has shuffled a deck of memories and thrown them randomly at the screen, as Claude revisits a greatest hits compilation of his most awkward, melancholic, and confusing moments.

The film’s structure, built from over 200 brief scenes, mirrors the fragmented nature of memory itself. Resnais uses this format to explore the elusive nature of time, making Je t'aime, je t'aime a poetic and cerebral meditation on human consciousness. And there are mice. Obviously there are mice. What crazy experiment doesn’t have mice?

Time Babble Series Five, Episode Two is waiting for you now on your favourite podcast service. If you can’t find it, please write in to the usual address.

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