- Fanny Ardant and André Dussollier in Resnais’s Life Is a Bed of Roses
I know it’s purely coincidental, but it feels fortuitous that there have been so many revivals of Stephen Sondheim musicals in Chicago in the wake of Alain Resnais’s death. Resnais was an outspoken fan of Sondheim’s—he recruited the groundbreaking Broadway composer to write the score for Stavisky… (1974), and it’s presumed that he cast Elaine Stritch in Providence (1978) on the basis of seeing her in Sondheim’s Company when he lived in New York in the early 1970s. (It’s also worth noting that Sondheim would go on to write original songs for Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, which Resnais—who cited Chester Gould’s comic strip as a lifelong source of inspiration—was briefly considered to direct.) One can detect a notable Sondheim influence on Life Is a Bed of Roses (1983), screening in Doc Films’s Resnais retrospective this Thursday at 7 PM, in its musical interludes and theatrical mise-en-scene. The film’s intricate plot, which alternates between three fanciful stories set in the same castle at different times, suggests a narrative equivalent to Sondheim’s use of counterpoint and anticipates the time-shifting structure of his Sunday in the Park With George.
In this attribute I sense the strongest affinity between Sondheim and Resnais, whose movies convey a similar interiority. Resnais’s breakthroughs in film editing, of course, derived from an effort to visualize the nature of thought. The current productions of Road Show and Passion demonstrate how another artist arrived at similar breakthroughs by way of a very different path.
