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In the midst of rehearsals for a new play, amateur dramatics proponents Colin and Kathryn receive the shattering news that their friend George is fatally ill and only has a few months to live.

Swansong from French Director Alain Resnais in an Aykbourn adaptation.

Resnais brought us the likes of &#39;Hiroshima Mon Amour&#39; and has collaborated with Alan Aykbourn in the past. Here he takes Aykbourn&#39;s very English play – sets it in Yorkshire and does it in French. It is about three couples who are all am dram enthusiasts. They are rehearsing a play and find out that a mutual friend – George – is terminally ill and has only mere months to live.<br/><br/>They decide the play must go on but they will all rally around for George – whom they all have great affection for. The play unravels the motivations of all the players in a slow reveal that can be amusing and at times stylistically &#39;stagey&#39;. It is also filmed on artificial sets to give the added feeling of being am dram and an actual play which will please or annoy depending on your taste. Thespians will appreciate the homage to the theatre.<br/><br/>The performances were all good, and the story is fine, but I felt it dragged a bit in parts, and it is only 109 minutes long. Still this is a fine swan song for Resnais who we sadly lost after he made this film. He was a marvellous talent of the French film industry and will be very much missed – if you are a fan of his work then I am sure you will not be disappointed in this – his last film.

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Life of Riley

What struck me most about this film adaptation of Alan Ayckbourn&#39;s play is how meta it turned out to be in light of director Alain Resnais&#39; death. Certainly not intending to make his final film (he was already adapting yet another Ayckbourn play for the screen), in retrospect the &#39;unseen&#39; George Riley easily stands in for the director. Here he also manages to beautifully blend his love of theater, film, and static images into a poetic whole. He also surrounds himself with his actor friends, all a good ten years older than the characters ought to be. But this only reinforces the play&#39;s timeless themes of life and death. Having his cast surround Riley&#39;s coffin with a final image of a skull with wings is haunting. Ayckbourn&#39;s presence also looms large over the film with the cast rehearsing his first London hit &quot;Relatively Speaking.&quot; Although the title goes unmentioned, the play script is clearly visible. Could the unseen but demanding play-within-the-play director Peggy be a stand-in for Ayckbourn&#39;s late agent, Peggy Ramsay? Unlike Resnais, &quot;Riley&quot; was thankfully not Ayckbourn&#39;s finale ultimo. To date he has penned five more major plays bringing his total to 79. Long may he thrive and live &quot;the life of Riley.&quot;

Life of Riley was, of course, the last film directed by Alain Resnais who died just over one month ago and is not only a shining example of French Cinema but also the most succinct illustration I know of that the much praised and highly overrated New Wave was merely a ripple unworthy of note. Resnais, who began as an &#39;experimental&#39; filmmaker at roughly the same time as the faux &#39;movement&#39; was hailed by the new waveleteers as one of their own but quickly disassociated himself by turning out a highly accomplished and vastly entertaining string of mainstream movies of which Life of Riley is as good an example as any. Like 90% per cent of his films it could have been shot at virtually any time between the coming of Sound and the late nineteen fifties or, to put it another way, that minor hiccup circa 1958-1962 changed nothing. For a third time - and he was working on a fourth at the time of his death - Resnais turned to the work of English playwright Sir Alan Ayckbourne for his source material and once we set aside the bizarre aspects of translating an English text into French, have French actors play French-speaking English characters and then, via subtitles, translate the text back into an English bearing little or no relationship to the actual text performed in English theatres we are left with a fine swansong from a great filmmaker. The plot, as it often does in Ayckbourne&#39;s work, revolves around three couples and - in this case - their reaction to the news that a seventh friend, George Riley, is terminally ill though I feel sure that Mr. Ayckbourne would be the last person to claim credit for originating the time-honoured &#39;offstage&#39; eponymous character who, in living memory only, can be traced back to 1935 and Clifford Odets&#39; breakthrough One-Act drama Waiting For Lefty, which in turn spawned Edward, My Son, to say nothing of Beckett&#39;s Waiting For Godard - To Make A Decent Film. Sorry about that but it was, of course irresistible. Suffice it to say that Resnais regular (and long-time real-life partner) Sabine Azema, leads a fine ensemble, not least fellow Resnais regular Andre Dussollier, through a highly enjoyable, vastly entertaining film from an iconic figure in French Cinema.

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Life of Riley

Swansong from French Director Alain Resnais in an Aykbourn adaptation.

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