L'Immortelle
With Françoise Brion, Jacques Doinol-Valcroze, Guido Celano.
France/Italy/Turkey, 1963, 16mm, black & white, 100 min.
French with English subtitles.
In Istanbul, a French lecturer meets a mysterious woman, also a foreigner, who shows him around the city and then abruptly vanishes. Nouveau roman writer Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay for Last Year at Marienbad a year earlier revealed a preoccupation with the image of the labyrinth. In his first film as director, the foreign city is a labyrinth in which the unnamed hero is lost linguistically, culturally, geographically, and emotionally. The Turkish music, the threatening dogs, the incomprehensible language, and the shrieking sirens create a sense of alienation—an “Orient seen from Paris, a picture-postcard Orient,” as Robbe-Grillet himself described it, in which an intriguing play on exotic and erotic stereotypes and the real and the imaginary (the woman may only exist in the man’s mind) suggests the nature of being uprooted.
