"Smoking" / "No smoking" ? : just quit.

Alain Resnais’s British connection is not limited to « Providence ». It also includes « Smoking » / « No smoking ».

Unfortunate Alan Aykburn material would have been better left untouched or trusted to British hands only.

Instead, it was hijacked across the English Channel to France, mishandled by unscrupulous screenwriters Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri and molested into the high concept of a double bill.

Celia Teasdale, a Yorshire housewife, is busy cleaning her house ; depending on whether she lights a cigarette (« Smoking ») or not (« No smoking »), the story and her life take different turns, while Resnais films not one movie, but two.

How clever. How tedious.

All aspects of production purposely emphasise the artificiality of the concept.

Films are shot in studio with artificial lighting and painted sets : in the times of Mélies, they were poetry born out of technical necessity ; in 1993, they are a display of affectation.

Visual treatment in comic book style, though superb, further alienates us from the story or stories.

All characters are played by the same two actors : Sabine Azema and Pierre Arditi. At her British best, she is as annoying as Emma Thompson. He is neither Michael Caine, nor Laurence Olivier and « Smoking » and « No smoking », even bundled together, are no « Sleuth » : their mindgames are to « Sleuth »’s what Chinese rice wine is to Gevrey Chambertin. « Smoking », « No smoking »...

How many people watched both ? It would be interesting to know. Conspiracy theorists will suspect this is only one film with two titles.

Both movies are supposedly funny, but Resnais’s humour is anything but spontaneous : it lies at the end of a long and tortuous intellectual process. Your brain does its best to convince you that the very idea of the film, its dialogues, the actors’ changes of costumes and accents, their talented imitation of bad acting are funny, but, however hard you try, you cannot force the smallest smile on your lips and, when, at last, you find a trace of humour, it has long been dead.

By the way, in both films, all paths lead to the cemetery. How profound and what a revelation. « Smoking » will take you there only marginally faster than « No smoking » : 144 instead of 140 minutes. So much for the dangers of tobacco, even if four minutes may seem a long time in front of a Resnais movie.

Conspiracy theorists will suspect that the project was sponsored by the cigarette industry. It would be a relief if « Smoking » at least could be blamed on greed.

Glum grin on the actors’ faces seems to tell us that the films are private jokes which we are not to share, or even that the jokes are on us.

Ultimately, the joke is on them and Resnais.

The films are so patronising that they become laughable. Rather than a story teller, Resnais is a class master, out to teach us lessons we already all know about : that the cinema must not be mistaken for real life ; that life ends in a cemetery ; that the tiniest detail may tip the scales of destiny.

While the basic pleasure of cinema stems from the balance between the audience awareness that the action on screen is not real and the filmmaker’s efforts to convince them it is, Resnais transforms the art of make believe into that of « un-make believe ».

The more the films show off their cleverness, the more they bare their silliness. Resnais is a pathetic demiurge : he delivers six wasted possible worlds in over two hours. The binary mode is the highest degree of complexity it can grasp.

Where less self-conscious works of art leave thousands of doors open to answer the elusive « what if » question, Resnais closes all but half a dozen and shapes his characters’ life with the petty mind of a civil servant filling an administrative form : yes or no.

Quite an achievement in two films which add up to less than one.