Stunninngly edited, beautifully photographed and featuring a rich soundtrack, esteemed French director Alain Resnais' first English language film combines some of the hoopiest dialog you've ever heard with an elegantly fragmented film style. Set inside the mind of a terminally ill writer played by John Gielgud, Providence is essentially a trivial and talky domestic drama set against a background of war as composed by the dying Gielgud using his family as prototypes for his characters. David Mercer's pretentious, literate dialog is a mixture of Harold Pinter and Noel Coward, and the actors, particularly Ellen Burstyn, perform with a miscalculated earnestness that makes them, like the film, seem downright silly. Nonetheless, Dirk Bogarde is dryly effective, and Gielgud's narration is entertaining. Gielgud was named Best Actor by the New York Film Critics Circle. With an old-fashioned, bombastic score by Milkos Rosa, allusions to werewolves, a graphic autopsy scene, allegorical overtones, and the occasional bomb going off in the background, Providence is a curio that's worth watching, but shouldn't be taken anymore seriously than say Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion(84). A critics' darling, and master of film technique, Resnais has never been a favorite of mine, though his classic non-fiction short, Night and Fog(58), is a beautiful elegiac poem and Last Year at Marienbad(62) is an intriguing enigma. The NY Times review referred to Providence as Alain Resnais' "disastrously ill-chosen comedy". Watch it for Gielgud, Resnais' chic, and laughs.
Review of Providence
