Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

JoeKulik After viewing Alain Robbe-Grillet's L'immortelle (1963), Trans-Europ-Express (1967), and The Man Who Lies (1968), Eden And After (1970) was a VERY BIG disappointment for me. I didn't see ANY artistic merit in this film whatsoever. I didn't see ANY interpretive meaning in this film either. And as a "straight" dramatic performance, this film just doesn't cut it either.I had to stop watching this film about half way through, which I NEVER do. The whole premise of the storyline, if you want to call that, is absurd. Sorry, but college students in 1970 just didn't act the way the kids in this film do. In France in May 1968, the college students of Paris demonstrated, and incited mass riots, bringing on a general strike that paralyzed France for a week, and they all did it out of their sincere belief in "democracy". In 1970, college students all over the world were demonstrating against the Vietnam War. Many female college students at that time were involved in the new feminist movement, not taking part in a fake gang rape of one of their fellow students. College students who were socially and politically active in those years were also busy keeping up with their studies. Those college students who weren't politically or socially active were just trying to study, finish school, get a job, and start a family. I don't know this filmmaker got the idea that college students circa 1970 were interested in "games" involving fake murders, and fake gang rapes, because they clearly weren't.The so called local college hangout, Eden, in this film is just from outer space. I was a college student in the SF Bay Area circa 1970, and no students would hangout in a squeaky clean chrome and glass "café" with a waiter dressed in a tuxedo, no less. Just unreal.So then a middle aged stranger wearing a business suit just walks into the café one day and tells one girl to cut her hands bloody by picking broken glass off the floor and she just complies?? Then this stranger tells another college girl to eat some white powder he calls "fear powder" and she does so willingly and ends up on some sort of bad trip? Sorry, college girls are just not that STUPID, especially when dealing with a middle aged man whose name nobody even knows.So even though only one student, Violette, took the hallucinogenic "fear powder", the whole gang of friends are watching a documentary about North Africa, and they all have an identical hallucination about being in North Africa? Or did the "fear powder" fairy waive her magic wand and actually make them appear in North Africa? When all the naked girls, the bondage, , the bath tub full of blood, the naked girls in cages, and the naked girl laying bleeding on the bed of spikes started, I knew that I had enough. Time to throw in the towel on this film !!! I have no idea what happened to Robbe-Grillet to go from the three earlier films of his that I saw, all of which having a high degree of artistic merit, and all having screenplays that were well conceived, well detailed, and well executed, then to go to this disastrous mess like this film.The great amount of sex and violence in this film was strictly gratuitous, as far as I could see, and was only there to titillate the viewer, if he was so inclined. None of the sex and violence really had any symbolic significance, or contextual meaning, as far as I could discern.Maybe Robbe-Grillet just took a heavy hit of LSD and went on a bad trip that he was still on when he made this film. I don't know, but that sure would make more sense than to assume that this previously great filmmaker could produce this loser of a film when he was straight and sober.

christopher-underwood Director, Alain Robbe-Grillet clearly had a liking for young ladies in very short mini dresses and their being chased and sometimes caught and sometimes more. Well he films this so beautifully and has such a beautiful lead in Catherine Jourdan that it is hard to object too much. I understand this was inspired by composer Schoenberg's original twelve tone technique and so there are a number (twelve actually) elements of narrative with repetition but I'm not sure I'm too interested in all that. The film is wonderful to look at, at all times and has some sort of narrative flow but it can be an effort to stay with it because nothing ever seems to be resolved or made very clear. The director, of course wrote Last Year at Marienbad and the pretty young Jourdan appeared with Marianne Faithful in, Girl on a Motorcycle.

pstumpf Typically elliptical Robbe-Grillet "narrative" about college students playing games with and enacting quasi-dangerous pranks on each other, mostly in a Mondrian-inspired cafe with colored panels and mirrors, until a Magus-like stranger inspires (?) or leads (?) them to more dangerous pursuits and practices in Tunisia. Or is it all a fantasy of the lovely protagonist, Violette (Catherine Jourdan)? What is real, and what is imaginary? Nothing in movies is real, except for the image itself, including the images of actors enacting behavior that is not real, but which represents the imagination of the writer/director. Many familiar R-G tropes here: beautiful women in bondage, and in blindfolds; a glass shattering on the floor; violent sexual encounters; exotic locales. Is there an underlying profundity here, or is it all just a provocative intellectual game of repetitive themes and obsessions, masterfully strung together in a sequence of beautiful images and sounds? The latter, one suspects. Everything is on the surface, even the violence; scenes of Russian roulette a deux, or a suicide by revolver in a blood-filled bath, evoke no real emotion in the viewer, apart from an admiration for Robbe-Grillet's ability to put his rather specialized fantasies on film for the delectation of cinemaddicts everywhere.

david melville Philosophical thriller or Post-Modern jigsaw or S&M skinflick - or all three at once - Alain Robbe-Grillet's first colour film is a dazzling, at times frustrating experience. Try to imagine Alice in Wonderland crossed with Story of O and you may get some idea of the perverse sensibility at work behind it. Starting off in a labyrinthine, mirror-lined nightclub called Eden, moving on to a disused factory with huge industrial vats full of sperm, ending up on the Tunisian island of Djerba - with, naturally, a detour through a jet-set torture chamber where glamorous naked women are crucified or suspended in cages - Robbe-Grillet takes his wide-eyed and waif-like heroine (Catherine Jourdan) on a spiritual and erotic odyssey to...what exactly? Sorry, but I don't know either.Nor does Robbe-Grillet seem the tiniest bit inclined to let us in on the secret. According to a mysterious stranger (Pierre Zimmer) who breaks in on Jourdan and her jaded pals, it's something to do with transcending the limits of rational Western consciousness. Finding a darker and more primitive reality. "Break on through to the other side" - or so The Doors might put it. Intriguing enough in a drugged-up late 60s kind of way, but Robbe-Grillet's own personal "doors of perception" don't seem to open very far beyond a spot of mild flagellation, or some Emmanuelle-style sex tourism on a photogenic Third World beach.At least the film is exquisite to behold. Its imagery is bizarre and erotic and disturbing. Catherine Jourdan - who went on to make even weirder movies with director/husband Alain Fleischer - is a lovely heroine in the tradition of the Marquis de Sade's Justine. She combines the doe-eyed fragility of a Mia Farrow with the icy blonde sensuality of a Catherine Deneuve. As her lover, Richard Leduc is undeniably handsome - but he seems far too sweet and mild-mannered for some seriously nasty sex-games with a blindfold and a bucket of scorpions. As for any ultimate meaning, you may or may not want to work that out. I suspect most of us would be happier not knowing.Incidentally, Eden and After is one of Robbe-Grillet's MORE linear films in terms of plot - yet it's also one of his hardest to grasp. Perhaps there's a lesson to be learned from that, but - once again - don't ask me what!David Melville