Bores : take 1.

A small piece of family folklore. During his courtship of my mother, my father took her to watch "L'année dernière à Marienbad" (" Last year at Marienbad ", 1961). He walked out (Orson Welles, too, after two reels), she stayed to the end. They later made it up or this blog would not be.

Many years afterwards, I watched the film, on my own, to the end. Boring ? Sure, what do you expect of a Resnais film from a Robbe-Grillet script (in a palatial hotel, a man tries to convince a woman -Delphine Seyrig- that they have met before) ?

But a piece of cake compared to "Hiroshima, mon amour" (1958) and " Muriel " (1962), two other critically acclaimed Resnais works.

" Hiroshima, mon amour " : French woman -Emmanuelle Riva- meets Japanese man in post-nuclear Hiroshima, after meeting German man in Nevers, a city of central France, during WW2. Love, war, memory. Lofty issues for possibly one of the 10 worst films ever ; not just boring : awful, appalling, lead-footed, so self-conscious as to become ultimately laughable.

" Muriel " : a widow -Delphine Seyrig again- resumes her acquaintance with a former lover, while her stepson is obsessed by the memory of Muriel, a young woman tortured in Algeria during the war. Again, love, war, memory... And boredom...

Boring, but also hazardous to your health : -lack of- takes place in Boulogne, a dreary harbour on the French North Sea, sporting possibly the ugliest church ever built and not destroyed by a compassionate bomb ; Delphine Seyrig's coat and hairdress will give any sensible individual the creeps.

To quote French critic Jacques Lourcelles, Alain Resnais deserves to be acknowledged as one of " his century's more boring intellectuals. "