Claud Langham (Dirk Bogarde) is an extremely unlikable man – a ferocious prosecution lawyer, his latest case is that of Kevin Woodford (David Warner), a young ex-soldier discharged and put on trial for a mercy killing of an older man, asserting that it was an act of compassion. Claud’s personal life seems to be just miserable, yet he is content with it. His wife, Sonia (Ellen Burstyn) clearly does not love him, nor does he seem to love her. There are indications that their marriage was the result of youthful impulse rather than anything resembling long-lasting love, and it manifests in their constant bickering and frequents attempt to get back at the other. Sonia starts an affair with Woodford, and openly reveals her attraction to the man, which seems to only be a means to exact vengeance on her callous husband. In response, instead of trying to convince his wife that he is a good person, Claud starts an affair with the genial but mysterious American spinster, Helen (Elaine Stritch), who bears resemblance to his long-dead mother. Over the course of some time, these four characters engage in a sardonic game of philosophical cat-and-mouse, always trying to get the better of the other. It all seems quite compelling (and perhaps a tad confusing), until we discover that none of this is real – these events are the creative ramblings of Clive Langham (John Gielgud), an ageing writer who is seemingly living his last days in an empty countryside mansion, alone with nothing other than cigarettes, copious amounts of alcohol and his own demented imagination, and on the eve of what he is certain will be his last birthday, he imagines scenarios for his later books, using his own family as the pawns for his existential quandaries and crushing regrets. There are several striking moments in Providence that provoke the boundaries between what is real and manufactured, but one of the most lingering occurs partway during a tense confrontation between Claud and his wife, where she simply states:

“I’m not a person, I’m a construction…yours”

The above quote is one of several included in Providence, the daring collaboration between English playwright David Mercer and French filmmaker and stalwart of the New Wave, Alain Resnais. An unlikely partnership, built upon difficulties in communication and a marvellous idea, resulted in something quite extraordinary, a brilliant dark comedy that subverts all narrative conventions and becomes a profoundly postmodern work, a piece of metafictional storytelling that never wavers from its exceptional premise, as well as featuring a set of terrific performances derived from an extremely talented ensemble of Anglo-American performers. Resnais may be revered for some of his more popular works, such as Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima, mon amour, but it isn’t absurd to consider Providence to be one of his most exceptional works, and most effective experiments, in terms of the underlying themes, the story the film tells and how Resnais conveys this message, visually and narratively. It isn’t a film that can be easily understood, nor is it a film that is particularly easy, Providence is a complex masterwork, a deeply impenetrable but also immensely thought-provoking piece that defies conventional structure and rather develops into a vastly acute piece of social satire and artistic commentary.

Alain Resnais was not a filmmaker who played by the rules, at least not narratively. In his two masterworks alluded to above, he challenges storytelling conventions, and whether his works tend towards the more surreal (Last Year at Marienbad), or to the more profoundly haunting (Hiroshima, mon amour and Stavinsky…), he tells a story through unconventional means. Providence is a captivating investigation into the nature of creativity – and along with Mercer, Resnais crafts a compelling work deeply embedded within the school of postmodernism. When looking at postmodernism, we need to consider the seminal introductory comment on the style, courtesy of Jean-François Lyotard who boldly defined postmodernism as “incredulity towards metanarratives” – its a sentiment often cited by literary scholars, and one that fits better with Providence than most other films I’ve seen. At the core, Mercer and Resnais are satirizing the concept of metanarratives – Gielgud’s character is a writer who serves as the film’s narrator, but unlike the archetypal narrator, which is supposedly a neutral, objective figure, Clive Langham is deeply-biased, mainly because he is not merely relegating the scenes on screen, but defining and controlling them, often humorously dictating what is happening – characters enter and exit scenes almost randomly, and sometimes their voices are even replaced by their malevolent creator’s ramblings. He takes on a deity-like figure, an omnipotent arbiter of what can and cannot occur, using his own subjective feelings towards certain individuals, and blending them with his general disillusionment to the world around him and his misanthropic core to construct a story that not only allows him to express his own existential concerns, but also to inadvertently atone for his past actions. What starts as a very offbeat, often darkly comical film eventually evolves into a bleak, heart-wrenching portrait of a man struggling to reconcile his past, but also coming to terms with his own mortality, and as the chilling final moments of this film show, Resnais was not trying to make an absurd film, but rather a gripping psychological drama with elements of unhinged surrealism, used brilliantly for added effect.

Providence is a film with multiple meanings. Just consider the title itself – “providence” can refer to the supposed protection and guidance we get from a higher deity that informs our lives and provides us with a source of comfort (inextricably linked to the concept of Clive Langham as a god-like figure), or as a descendant of the Latin word providentia, which translates to the concept of foresight, which none of the characters seems to be capable of, living their lives through carnal satiation, or perhaps even vaguely related to the town of Providence, the seaside New England hamlet that many people with artistic tendencies and a desire for deeper meanings aspire to call home. At its core, this film is about a man exploring his own creativity, or lack thereof, and using his own deeply-rooted psychological issues to influence the lives of others, perhaps not directly, but through the stories he tells in his books. Beneath it, there are numerous other themes that are woven through it – the concept of a loveless marriage is most prominent, as is the idea of sexuality as a bargaining tool. Both of the central characters in the world of the novel use infidelity not as a way of satiating their lust (neither are shown to be entirely concerned with romance), but to assert dominance over the other. Their open, frank discussion about their cheating is stark but effective, especially when we take into account this film isn’t about ordinary desire, but rather the lust for power over the other. Another prominent theme is family – in the third act, the story radically shifts and remains firmly within the real world, as Clive is visited by his two sons, who are revealed to be the inspirations for Claud and Kevin, and even though they appear to be decent, upstanding individuals, the familial tension is still there, as Resnais and Mercer quietly provoke the discomfort of a fractured father-son relationship to the point where it is quite unsettling, amongst other powerful themes.

More than anything else, Providence is a film about creativity and a testament to the challenges of the artistic process. It is a film that has its roots in metafiction, and crosses boundaries, being a film about writing, with the intersections between the concepts being carefully crafted and ultimately extraordinarily engrossing. This is a story made by people who evidently understand the frustrations that come with trying to be creative – and considering Resnais’ films very often were introspective, melancholy works that had some element of reality to them shows his clear resonance with this kind of story, if only for the common theme of the difficulties in separating fact from fiction. This is a great forerunner for other films like Stranger Than Fiction (remarkably similar in how it is a film governed by an omnipotent figure who turns out to be a writer), Ruby Sparks, Adaptation and several others. However, the work that I think was most inspired by Providence was Synecdoche, New York – both works deal with authors contemplating their own mortality, and venturing off into their imaginations as a way of reconciling their own flaws through the guise of creativity. There is also the idea that he has found it impossible to draw the distinction between reality and fiction – a climactic moment occurs towards the end of the second act, where Warner’s character boldly asks: “did you create hell all these years, just to have something to write about?”. This is a deeply distressing concept because throughout the film, we are led to believe these fictional events are just Clive’s way of working through the past. When it is implied that everything in his life that went wrong – his sons growing distant, his wife’s suicide and his own crushing loneliness, were not coincidental, but rather manufactured by his own ego, looking for material and not feeling any remorse for using those around him as pawns for his own creative process. Beautifully riveting on a philosophical level, undeniably upsetting on a psychological one.

What really makes a significant impact with Providence is that it is often an extremely humorous film, not only because the way it is structured is quite arbitrary and offbeat (it is a wonderfully playful film, and shows Resnais embracing the absurdity of life), but also because it is a melancholy, almost desolate work. Clive Langham is an inherently unlikable character – he is driven by his vices, he is distant from his sons (and favours one over the other), is highly-critical of absolutely everyone, and seems to feel he is superior to both his forerunners and contemporaries. Yet, he is also a broken man, someone who is trying his best to work through his own trauma and past mistakes the only way he knows how: by channelling it through his work. This makes the final moments of the film, where his jovial and upbeat demeanour is almost instantly brought to a halt, replaced with a deeply anxious desire for isolation, and he requests his children leave immediately. Whether this is one of his artistic quirks manifesting in an outward demand, or a final farewell to his family to distance them from himself and his ideas isn’t made clear – but his final remark of “time for one more”, said with a joyful smile, implies something much deeper, and requires a great deal of additional thought. This is an anomaly of a man – someone who recognizes that he has made mistakes, and certainly regrets them to an extent (although he’ll never admit it), yet he doesn’t feel any actual remorse – ultimately everything was worth the sacrifices he made. In the mind of Clive, he has done everything for a reason – and even the way the film ends seems to appear constructed: his children are forgiving and loving towards him, and dote over his every wish, and he appears happy. There is something profoundly inauthentic about the final act, and we could question whether or not it too is real or the figment of Clive’s imagination, a way for him to conclude his own story. The way it ends is exactly how we’d expect, with him walking alone, alone but still somehow content.

All the concepts in Providence eventually converge into how these characters are portrayed, and when it comes to postmodernism, the individual is pivotal to the story – unlike with modernism, whereby it focuses on the landscape and society in relation to the individual, postmodernism is much more focused on the individual himself, and considering there is a dismissal of metanarratives in the traditional sense, it allows for fascinating character development. This film doesn’t dismiss some higher power in the same way other works in this vein do, but rather subvert the idea by creating characters who are constructions not of an all-seeing deity, but of an omnipotent but very human creator who dictates their actions and creates their story based on his own personal quandaries. It is a wonderful quality of several postmodern works when a character realizes they are fictional – it isn’t very common in film, but in writing it has been observed often. Resnais blends fact and fiction with how these characters interact with each other, and questions their own unique relationship to reality. These aren’t one-dimensional characters, but well-formed archetypes that both remain within the confines of fiction, but are on the verge of breaking out and entering into reality. Providence may blend the real and the unreal, but unlike other works that keep them deeply separate (such as Tony and Susan by Austin Wright, which also wonderfully uses an author’s own philosophical crises to define their creative process), there is always the threat that they will become irreparably intertwined, which is a threatening concept for any artist – art is supposed to imitate life, rather than the opposite.

Postmodernism is a convention far kind to the written word than to the visual one, but Resnais certainly is not a director who would turn down the challenge. In casting some truly extraordinary performers, he extracted some incredible interpretations of these complex characters. The most profoundly impactful performance comes from Dirk Bogarde, who essentially plays two very different versions of the same character – for the first two acts, his portrayal of Claud is vicious, unlikeable and verbose, but when we are confronted by the “real” Claud at the end, he is quiet, respectful and in awe of his father despite decades of mistreatment and disrespect. Bogarde was a terrific actor, and much like in his performance the following year in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Despair, Bogarde has a unique capacity for playing multifaceted characters that can be truly despicable yet so deeply unsettling in how charming they are. Ellen Burstyn is terrific as Bogarde’s long-suffering wife who is tired of just being a stock character (“he saw me as I saw myself, which is as a reflection of how others see me”) and just longs for her independence, and with go to any lengths to achieve it. Finally, John Gielgud does well with an exceptionally difficult part – despite most of the film requiring him to remain in bed, as well as serving as the narrator for the story, it is through him that this story is tied together and becomes coherent. Without Gielgud’s performance buttressing it, this film would fall into nothing more than a disjointed divorce story. The role required an actor with a larger-than-life persona, and Gielgud commands the screen, even when he isn’t on it.

Providence is ultimately a unique film, and an experience unlike many represented on screen. It is arguably a very difficult film – it lacks a traditional narrative structure, and what does remain is brutally mangled by Resnais and Mercer into an impenetrable but captivating plot that takes the audience on a disconcerting adventure into the ambigious purgatory between reality and fiction. Its a film that requires a great deal of thought, and it isn’t the most straightforward film – yet, its beauty, both in terms of the simple but effective visuals and the dreamlike storytelling (helped massively by the exceptional writing, with Mercer having constructed a verbose but magnificent script, with his background in theatre made very clear throughout the dialogue in this film), make for a gripping and extraordinarily fascinating work. Resnais was a master of cinema, and while he may be remembered for his other work, the sheer ambition of Providence, combined with his effortless, confident directorial ability to convey the tricky script, makes for an undeniably rewarding experience. It is a powerful, funny and extremely spellbinding film that is dedicated to a puzzling but hypnotic concept that speaks not only to the artistic process but to our existence overall.