Would anyone feel free to explain?
Is it just a post modern mess or is there some fine line it follows. Was the whole african part a dream? or was it a game? Did the ending mean that the story was going to repeat itself? And if so in what way?
Anyways, no matter the answers this was a fantastic film!
Somebody here has been drinking and I'm sad to say it ain't me - Allan Francis Doyleshare
L'Éden Et Après is definitely not a modern mess - it is the probably the most brilliantly crafted postmodern and poststructuralist (and detournementist) film ever crafted - but the explanation of the plot itself is subjective (and deliciously ambivalent and ambiguous).
It does not matter whether or not Violette's Tunisian odyssey occurred in reality or in her mind. What matters is she was transformed emotionally and psychologically during the experience, even though after the experience she resumed her previous role of meaninglessness at the Café.
Intrigued by the musical structure of Schoenberg's atonalism, Robbe-Grillet deconstructed his L'Éden fabula (straightforward chronological logical plot, which he partially based on Alice In Wonderland and the Marquis De Sade's Justine) into a dodecaphonic pattern representing twelve "themes", which, in Robbe-Grillet's world, were more akin to material motifs - colours, objects, abstractions [hallucinations, the students' games].
In other words, the film is a visual counterpart of the structure of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.
Robbe-Grillet's work notes delineated the themes as:
1. Composition #234 of the Tunisian villa, which overlaps into a postcard and actual village
2. Blood - pop-art posters with the phrase "Buvez de Sang" overlap with cut hands and blood in the semen and other wounds
3. The double - Mirrors, Boris doubly poisoned, Duchemin/Dutchman doubly drowned, Violette doubly dancing, Violette's double/dualistic life (hallucination bersus reality, subconscious versus conscious), Violette's doppelganger
4. The Dance
5. Light
6. The Labyrinth
7. The Prison
8. Images and symbols of sperm
9. Eroticism
10. Death - simulated or imagined
11. Water
12. Doors/Portals
He concatenated all of that into ten dazzling (and in my opinion, logical), cinematic sequences, and some of the events can be connected to specific myths. Unforeseen changes were instituted during filming as well, but according to his notes, and verifiable by the film itself, the ten sequences are:
1. Credits
2. Café Eden before the Stranger
3. The Cocaine Fizzies / Hallucinations / Games
4. Café Eden after the Stranger arrives
5. The Factory
6. The projected film on Tunisia
7. The Tunisian village Djerba
8. Duchemin's villa
9. The Prison
10. Violette in the desert
The resulting syuzhet is an exhilarating mise-en-abîme stream of titillating images and events that are conjunctively interconnected and symbolize relevant "normal" themes ranging from repressed female sexuality to the connection between sex and violence to Knowing Thyself.
Each of the 10 base sequences are chronological and logical, and contain sustained flashes of modality, but certain components branch away improvisationally, like in-the-moment atonal jazz (Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Schoenberg).
The branching away was carefully plotted, not random spur-of-the-moment editing, and, like jazz, the dizzying segues (cages here and cages there, a whip slash or two, heaping gobs of dripping semen and doppelgangers and surjective functions and bloody hands and powder falling and canals [birthing canals, water of subconsciousness...] and erotic dances and a horseback abduction sequence and swirls of vivid Tunisian clothing and a scorpion or two...) still meditate upon the main plot (Violette breaking free from herself in order to truly free herself) and the segues always return and meld right back logically into that plot. There is a symmetry of events but the symmetry is pre-meditatively torn asunder, but the meandering moments are all relevant and interconnected to the film as a whole.
Africa is not a dream - it is in our blood, life is a game, and everything in life is a repetition.
I felt that the ending meant, ironically and unfortunately, that even liberation is not liberation. Even liberation is an illusion. But at least we are "free" for those few moments, catapulted into a brief Utopian Sybaritic interlude of our own design in which we assert our innermost desires unrestrained in order to find out who we really are, but then the moment is over and we return to a Clockwork Orange.
The best way to explain it is "every early Godard film -- combined."
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pre·ten·tious: characterized by assumption of dignity or importance.
I felt that the ending meant, ironically and unfortunately, that even liberation is not liberation. Even liberation is an illusion. But at least we are "free" for those few moments, catapulted into a brief Utopian Sybaritic interlude of our own design in which we assert our innermost desires unrestrained in order to find out who we really are, but then the moment is over and we return to a Clockwork Orange.