Night Thoughts

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

PROVIDENCE

Directed by ALAIN RESNAIS

Screenplay by DAVID MERCER

At one point in this painfully self-conscious movie, Dirk Bogarde lifts an eyebrow to that magnificent height he alone of contemporary leading men can scale and declares his opposition to political violence on the grounds that it "reeks of spontaneity." It is the only moment in the film that one feels comes from the hearts of Director Resnais and Writer Mercer, whose distrust of the spontaneous is woven into every tedious frame of this stupefying work. Calculation is their bag, and they have calculated the life right out of a conceit that clearly was not much to begin with.

Most of the movie takes place during one awful night in the sleepless imagination of a dying novelist (played with fierce relish by John Gielgud). Trying to construct a final fiction, his mind keeps moving his son (Bogarde), his son's wife (Ellen Burstyn), his bastard progeny (David Warner) and his own dead wife (Elaine Stritch) around a mythical country. His vision of his dear ones is, to say the least, misanthropic. They are cold, loveless creatures, incapable of responding to one another except by lobbing epigrams, Wildean in rhythm but not in wit, back and forth.

Finally, the night passes, and in a kind of coda the old gaffer's kin arrive at his chateau to help him celebrate his birthday. One now sees the raw material he has been working with. If none of his family has genius, or even an excess of individuality, they all appear to be rather pleasant people, undeserving of the imaginary treatment they have received. The audience is left once again --and once too often--to speculate on the gap between reality and illusionary art, and on the widely alleged necessity for the artist to behave inhumanely. These gaseous themes have preoccupied the literary mind, determined to romanticize its own workings, too much in this century. Until now, thank heavens, the movies have avoided such blather. Perhaps this dismally attenuated movie will warn other film makers away from a conceit that has not even served literature very well. If so, Resnais's icily expert technique will not have been expended totally in vain . Richard Schickel

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.