''Je t'aime, je t'aime'' ("I Love You, I Love You") is a 1968 French

science fiction film Science fiction (or sci-fi) is a film genre that uses speculative, fictional science-based depictions of phenomena that are not fully accepted by mainstream science, such as extraterrestrial lifeforms, spacecraft, robots, cyborgs, interstellar ...

directed by

Alain Resnais Alain Resnais (; 3 June 19221 March 2014) was a French film director and screenwriter whose career extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included ...

from a screenplay by

Jacques Sternberg Jacques Sternberg (April 17, 1923, Antwerp, Belgium – October 11, 2006, Paris) was a French-language writer of science fiction and ''fantastique''. Biography Sternberg was born to a well-to-do Russian-Jewish family. He was a poor student in ...

. The plot centres on Claude Ridder (

Claude Rich Claude Rich (8 February 1929 – 20 July 2017) was a French stage and screen actor. He began his career in the theater before his film debut in 1955. Personal life He married actress Catherine Renaudin on 26 June 1959. They had two daughters, ...

) who is asked to participate in a mysterious experiment in

time travel Time travel is the concept of movement between certain points in time, analogous to movement between different points in space by an object or a person, typically with the use of a hypothetical device known as a time machine. Time travel is a w ...

when he leaves the hospital after a

suicide attempt A suicide attempt is an attempt to die by suicide that results in survival. It may be referred to as a "failed" or "unsuccessful" suicide attempt, though these terms are discouraged by mental health professionals for implying that a suicide res ...

. The experiment, intended to return him after one minute of observing the past, instead causes him to experience his past in a disjointed fashion. The film was listed to compete at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, but the festival was cancelled due to the countrywide

wildcat strike The wildcat is a species complex comprising two small wild cat species: the European wildcat (''Felis silvestris'') and the African wildcat (''F. lybica''). The European wildcat inhabits forests in Europe, Anatolia and the Caucasus, while the ...

that occurred in

May 1968 in France Beginning in May 1968, a period of civil unrest occurred throughout France, lasting some seven weeks and punctuated by demonstrations, general strikes, as well as the occupation of universities and factories. At the height of events, which ha ...

. While seldom ranked among Resnais's best works, ''Je t'aime, je t'aime'' has received positive reviews since its release. Its synopsis has been cited as an influence on the 2004

Michel Gondry Michel Gondry (; born 8 May 1963) is a French filmmaker noted for his inventive visual style and distinctive manipulation of mise en scène. Along with Charlie Kaufman, he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay as one of the writers ...

film ''

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ''Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'' (also simply known as ''Eternal Sunshine'') is a 2004 American romantic science fiction drama film written by Charlie Kaufman, directed by Michel Gondry, and starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. P ...

''.

Plot

Claude Ridder (

) is leaving hospital after an attempt at suicide by shooting himself through his heart, when he is asked to participate in a mysterious experiment in

by a private research body. They have succeeded in sending mice back unharmed for periods of one minute, but need to send a human back to confirm the subject did actually revisit the past. Claude agrees, but instead of returning promptly as the mice had done, he re-experiences many episodes from his past in a highly disjointed and fragmented manner, in interludes of seconds or minutes. Claude's observations culminate in his admission – which, throughout the movie, he has frequently dismissed as a fabrication – that he had killed his morbid, sad, and terminally ill life partner, Catrine ( Olga Georges-Picot), painlessly by gas poisoning, upon seeing her in her sleep – for the first time in her life – completely happy and without fear. Subsequently, his attempted suicide is shown to emerge from the painful realization that not only can he not live with her, he cannot live without her. The researchers wait an hour before concluding they will never get him out of the time machine. As they leave the lab, they happen upon Ridder's body on the grass, a gunshot through his heart. Seemingly, in the instant of revisiting his suicide attempt, he has traversed not only time but space as well and broken out of the time machine – as a man who is about to die. As his mortally wounded body is carried inside by the scientists, he opens his mouth in a struggle to speak, and a single teardrop falls down his cheek. His fate – that is, whether or not the "second" suicide attempt was successful – is left ambiguous.

Cast

as Claude Ridder * Olga Georges-Picot as Catrine *

Anouk Ferjac Anouk Ferjac (born 25 May 1932) is a French actress. She has appeared in 100 films and television shows between 1946 and 2000. Selected filmography * ''Scandal on the Champs-Élysées'' (1949) * '' Justice Is Done'' (1950) * '' Without Trumpet ...

as Wiana Lust *

Alain MacMoy Alain may refer to: People * Alain (given name), common given name, including list of persons and fictional characters with the name * Alain (surname) * "Alain", a pseudonym for cartoonist Daniel Brustlein * Alain, a standard author abbreviation u ...

as Le technicien qui vient chercher Ridder *

Vania Vilers Vania may refer to: * Vania (caste), a social group of India * ''Vania'' (foram), a genus of fossil foraminifers * ''Vania'' (plant), a genus of plants in the family Brassicaceae * Vânia, or Vania, a given name (including a list of people with t ...

as Le technicien-chauffeur * Ray Verhaeghe as Le technicien aux souris * Van Doude as Jan Rouffer, le chef du centre de recherches de Crespel *

Yves Kerboul Yves may refer to: * Yves, Charente-Maritime, a commune of the Charente-Maritime department in France * Yves (given name), including a list of people with the name * ''Yves'' (single album), a single album by Loona * ''Yves'' (film), a 2019 Fren ...

as Le technicien au tableau noir *

Dominique Rozan "Dominique" is a 1963 French language popular song, written and performed by the Belgian female singer Jeannine Deckers, better known as Sœur Sourire ("Sister Smile" in French) or The Singing Nun. The song is about Saint Dominic, a Spanish-born ...

as Le médecin de Crespel / Doctor Haesserts *

Annie Bertin Annie may refer to: People and fictional characters * Annie (given name), a given name and a list of people and fictional characters with the name * Annie (actress) (born 1975), Indian actress * Annie (singer) (born 1977), Norwegian singer The ...

as La jeune femme à la trompette *

Jean Michaud Jean may refer to: People * Jean (female given name) * Jean (male given name) * Jean (surname) Fictional characters * Jean Grey, a Marvel Comics character * Jean Valjean, fictional character in novel ''Les Misérables'' and its adaptations * Jea ...

as Le directeur de la maison de diffusion *

Claire Duhamel Claire Duhamel (September 6, 1925 – February 7, 2014) was a French film and stage actress An actor or actress is a person who portrays a character in a performance. The actor performs "in the flesh" in the traditional medium of the theatre ...

as Jane Swolfs *

Bernard Fresson Bernard Fresson (27 May 1931 – 20 October 2002) was a French actor who primarily worked in film. Born in Reims, France, to a French baker, Fresson attended the Lycée privé Sainte-Geneviève, majoring in law. He studied in Tania Balachova's ...

as Bernard Hannecart * Sylvain Dhomme as L'homme qui invite Ridder à dîner *

Irène Tunc Irène Tunc (25 September 1935 – 16 January 1972) was a French actress and model. She was crowned Miss France in 1954. She was the wife of film director Alain Cavalier and she died in a car crash in 1972. She appeared in 35 films and telev ...

as Marcelle Hannecart

Reception

Box office

According to Fox records the film required $875,000 in rentals to break even and by 11 December 1970 had made $450,000 so made a loss to the studio.

Critical response

Today, ''Je t'aime, je t'aime'' is reviewed positively by critics; review aggregator

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...

reports 83% approval (based on six critics' reviews), with an average rating of 7.5/10. IMDB reviewers gave the film the average rating of 7.2/10. The film made two critics’ top-10 lists in the 2012 ''

Sight & Sound ''Sight and Sound'' (also spelled ''Sight & Sound'') is a British monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute (BFI). It conducts the well-known, once-a-decade ''Sight and Sound'' Poll of the Greatest Films of All Time, ongoing ...

'' polls of the greatest films ever made.

Penelope Houston Penelope Houston (born December 17, 1958) is an American singer-songwriter best known as the singer for the San Francisco-based punk rock band the Avengers. She was raised in Seattle. In the mid-1970s she attended Fairhaven College in Bellin ...

, writing in ''Sight and Sound'' winter issue of 1969-1970, praised Resnais for the film's editing, saying that "one has never been more aware of Resnais exploring time through timing: matchless editing, an unfailing instinct for the duration of a shot."

Manohla Dargis Manohla June Dargis () is an American film critic. She is one of the chief film critics for ''The New York Times''. She is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Career Before being a film critic for ''The New York Times'', ...

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

highlighted the theme of memory in the film, "Claude’s journeys into the past resemble nothing less than memory — fragmented, inconstant, taunting, joyous and heartbreaking. We are, the movie reminds us, what we remember, with a consciousness built from reminiscences that flicker, fade and repeat, flicker, fade and repeat." After Kino Lorber's Blu-ray release of the film in 2015, American film critic

Jonathan Rosenbaum Jonathan Rosenbaum (born February 27, 1943) is an American film critic and author. Rosenbaum was the head film critic for ''The Chicago Reader'' from 1987 to 2008, when he retired. He has published and edited numerous books about cinema and has ...

wrote, "but for better and for worse, ''Je t’aime je t'aime'' functions as a first-person narrative, even more than Resnais’ earlier ''Hiroshima mon amour'' and his later masterpiece ''Providence'', although we may have some trouble accepting its melancholy and marginal protagonist, a sort of bureaucratic fixture whose professional identity resides in the fringes of the publishing world, as a full-fledged hero." David Gregory Lawson of ''Film Comment'' wrote, "Alain Resnais’s psychologically bruising ''film maudit'' is a sci-fi romance that charts a long-term relationship’s evolution from an atypically sullen meet-cute to the bitter resentment only the profound understanding of another human being can breed," and noted the use of time travel as a film device that explores "exploring the obstacles life poses to receiving or displaying affection and for probing the pleasures of solitude." Leo Gray of ''The Baltimore Suns'' summarized the film, "this 1968 film's title, "Je t'aime, je t'aime," translated into English is "I love you, I love you," which suggests that what you are about to watch very well could be a sappy French romance. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, director Alain Resnais' film is a futuristic psychological drama and a deep dive into the disturbing nuances of a damaged relationship and the suicidal mind."

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Je Taime Je Taime 1968 films 1960s avant-garde and experimental films 1960s French-language films 1960s science fiction films French avant-garde and experimental films French science fiction films Films directed by Alain Resnais Films about time travel 1960s French films