The Man Who Lies
(L’homme qui ment)
Screening on Film
Directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet.
With Jean-Louis Trintignant, Sylvie Breal.
France/Czechoslovakia, 1968, 35mm, black & white, 95 min.
French with English subtitles.
Print source: HFA
With Jean-Louis Trintignant, Sylvie Breal.
France/Czechoslovakia, 1968, 35mm, black & white, 95 min.
French with English subtitles.
Print source: HFA
Jean-Louis Trintignant received the Best Actor award at the Berlin Film Festival for his performance in The Man Who Lies, a highly influential film in its time and the third directorial effort by French “new” novelist Robbe-Grillet. In this filmic jigsaw puzzle that enlists the spectator’s imagination in assembling the fragments the author-director supplies, a stranger who claims to be a member of the wartime underground, but who may have been a fascist, arrives in a town. He constantly re-invents his identity in order to gain entrance—and acceptance—into a household of three beautiful women whose son, brother, and lover have perhaps never returned from the war.