L’homme qui ment

DIRECTED BY: Alain Robbe-Grillet

FEATURING: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Sylvie Bréal, Zuzana Kocúriková, Sylvia Turbová, Ivan Mistrík, Catherine Robbe-Grillet

PLOT: A mysterious stranger gradually infiltrates the home and family of a missing man.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The Man Who Lies suffers from doppelgänger syndrome, both the title character and the film as a whole. A second shadow protagonist haunts the main character, who defends his own existence and reality by repeatedly telling the same story over and over again. But with each telling the details change, until the final version becomes the exact opposite of the first. Where reality ends and the lies begin is impossible to untangle. Every scene of the film negates its own double and even the dual protagonists swap identities by the end.

COMMENTS: In the opening narration, Trintignant introduces himself as “Jean Robin” but then backpeddles and admits he’s actually called “Boris Varissa.” And people sometimes call him “The Ukrainian,” though he doesn’t know why. As the film progresses, it becomes obvious none of these names actually belong to him, and we never find out who he really is. In one meta-moment, he even describes himself as an actor rehearsing a role. Robbe-Grillet covers much the same territory as Last Year at Marienbad but in a more comedic tone, closer to the literal winking at the camera of Trans-Europ Express.

“Boris” enters a small rural town after escaping from a brigade of soldiers. He describes how he anonymously disappears into the crowd, though we see him walking alone down deserted streets. He enters a pub, which he describes as empty, though it’s so full of patrons he has difficulty finding a seat. Here the townspeople discuss the unknown fate of local hero Jean Robin, whose portrait adorns every building in town.

The details of Robin’s disappearance are sketchy and inconsistent. No one is quite sure where he is, how long he’s been away, or when he will return. Some believe he will definitely come back, others declare him dead. His poor lovely wife and sister remain in their crumbling ancestral chateau awaiting his return, though no one has actually seen them in years.

Boris immediately begins telling everyone he was great friends with Jean Robin during the war. In fact, he personally helped Jean escape their enemies. No one is particularly inclined to hear this tale, and many, like the pub’s proprietor, treat the interloper with outright contempt. Others act like he isn’t even there.

After this inauspicious debut, Boris heads to the Robin chateau. There, Jean’s wife, Laura, his sister, Sylvia, and their maid, Maria, amuse themselves playing Blind Man’s Bluff and other obscure games involving blindfolds and medieval weapons. Boris first insinuates himself into the affections of Maria. He regales her with long tales of Jean’s heroism in the Resistance. But cracks quickly develop in his facade. He doesn’t recognize his dear friend’s elderly father? And who is this Dr Mueller he speaks of? There is no doctor of that name in town.

In one scene, where he meets with Jean’s sister, Trintignant poses before a grave in a cemetery marked with the name “Boris Varissa,” which he quickly moves to hide from her. In another scene, he re-enacts his own near-death experience for Maria, telling her dramatically of how he suffered a near-fatal head wound. As he collapses, he pours a bottle of fake blood onto his chest. “But wasn’t it a head wound?” she asks him.

Even with the humor, the repetition of Jean/Boris story gets a little tiresome. The viewer may find themselves thinking, like the film’s characters, there he goes again—the war, the war—whenever Boris launches into yet another version of the narrative. Though he initially lauds Jean as a valiant hero, Boris eventually claims he was actually a treacherous traitor. But since Boris is a liar, the identities of both men remain questionable and unstable.

After a while, it’s the women who fascinate, though they hardly say a word. They play their strange games in an abandoned attic full of forgotten heirlooms and family portraits. Here Robbe-Grillet displays all his classic fetishes: the nape of the neck, the suspended gesture, bound wrists. Though Maria and Sylvia succumb to Boris’ advances, Laura remains spectral and aloof. She drifts through the house in a long white nightgown, appearing to give no credence whatsoever to anything Boris says. Indeed, she barely acknowledges his existence.

Unable to crack her, Boris starts to lose it. When Jean’s father dies in a sudden accident and a “Dr Mueller” shows up to write the death certificate, Boris looks genuinely spooked. Though he makes headway in removing his detractors, his success in taking Jean’s place at the chateau is far from secure, as the subject of his lies keeps coming back to haunt him.

In his quasi-autobiographical “romanesque,” Ghosts in the Mirror, Robbe-Grillet credits the mysterious figure of Count Henri de Corinthe with providing the inspiration for the screenplay. In Robbe-Grillet’s telling, Corinthe comes across as a Ripley-esque character, who may have disappeared one of his own friends in order to “borrow” his military exploits. Of course, we must take this explanation with a grain of salt for, as Robbe-Grillet admits, in writing the book he deliberately took on the role of the man who lies for himself. Any viewer looking to discern the “truth” here will inevitably be frustrated—by design.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Shades of the filmmaker’s script for Last Year At Marienbad can be picked up on throughout the movie but here he blends that with the pseudo-surrealism he’d started toying with in Trans-Europ Express, a film that, like this one, is more concerned with the viewer’s interpretation of reality than reality itself.… The Man Who Lies isn’t the best starting point for those new to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s work but it’s an interesting, stylish and at times intriguingly sexy mix of mystery and artsy surrealism, the kind that fans of his work will no doubt appreciate. – Ian Jane, DVD Talk