Alain Resnais, who died last March at the age of 91, left us this gentle, muted swansong: an adaptation of the stage-play Life of Riley, by Alan Ayckbourn – an English author to whom Resnais was as attached as Claude Chabrol was to Ruth Rendell. A trio of couples are united in shock and anxiety as they hear that their old friend, George Riley, is terminally ill, with just a few months left. All of the women have some emotional or sexual history with Riley (who, like Godot, remains absent from the stage) and when they sentimentally invite him to take part in an amateur drama production they’re involved with, these long-submerged tensions rise to the surface.
The movie takes place in an odd, eccentric, artificial world: studio-bound stage sets which perhaps mimic the world of provincial theatre. Periodically, the gossipy, bickery dialogue will be interspersed with monologue speeches delivered in close-up against a stylised black-and-white, lattice-design backdrop. As with all of Resnais’s Ayckbourn adaptations, I find Life of Riley amiable but minor. One snowy-haired character, Simeon (André Dussollier) does look a little like Resnais himself: he says that he quite enjoyed his friends’ am-dram production – but prefers the cinema.
I personally prefer the more vital, cinematic ideas of Resnais in his youth to the stagey confections of his later years. But Life of Riley has its own sadness and charm.
