Stellead Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Brennan Camacho Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Winifred The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Delight Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

Karl Ericsson I would like to see someone produce a spoiler on this garbage (and, incidentally, probably all that robbe-grillet filmed - i just picked this one as a representative of all). This is BS-artistry pure. Unfortunately there is Money in art and in film, if you can get away with it. You need some Beautiful women to take there cloths off, of course, and a good cinematographer helps a lot as well. The Pictures are well lit and what you see of the women isn't bad - but that's it. No original thought here, in fact no thought whatsoever. That's why BS-artists are BS-artists - they basically have nothing to say about anything. There heads are a black hole from which nothing of value can escape. Robbe-Grillet and others of his ilk give film a bad name. Trintignant could be good - he proved that in other films. Here, however, he was taken in by a con-man, which is the essence of a BS-artist.

JoeKulik Alain Robbe-Grillet's Trans-Europ-Express (1967) is a film about making a film. As such, it is thematically related to Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966),and Vilgot Sjoman's I Am Curious (Yellow)(1967) and I Am Curious (Blue)(1968). That these European films were made almost simultaneously seems more than a mere coincidence here, and suggests some cross fertilization of filmmaking ideas.In any case, all these films center upon the same theme: "Where does the movie end, and reality begin?" The idea, of course, is hardly new, for in 1599, it was Shakespeare who penned in his play As You Like It: "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players." The point is that stage plays and theatrical films are merely a refinement and an objectification of what everyday people do everyday. We all assume the roles that society assigns to us, and read the lines off the script appropriate to a specific role, all the while wearing the "theater mask" for that socially assigned role.But it is Bergman, in his Persona, who most clearly articulates the main issue here, that while we are wearing various social masks, assuming our various social selfs, we are, to some extent, cutting ourselves off from our true, inner self. This is where the "inauthenticity", the emptiness, and the lack of real meaning in life that the Existentialists love to talk about emanates.This is significant to the character of the protagonist Elias in Trans-Europ-Express, because he comes across as a man without a real self, a genuine self. In fact, the viewer never learns the protagonist's real name for Elias is an alias, thusly making our protagonist somewhat anonymous, somewhat lacking in a real self in the storyline itself. Add to that the fact that his "mission" in the film as a drug courier is a role that was recently assigned to him, a role then that his is just "rehearsing", and thus distant from his real self, and we have a perfect model of a seemingly "everyday man" who has donned a social mask and is merely playing a contrived social role . Elias' proclivity toward prostitutes and sado-masochism is particularly interesting in this regard too, because his brutal sado-masochistic persona, which emerges when he is alone with a prostitute seems alien to his personality in all other scenes in the film. So, the sado-masochistic Elias is prominently portrayed as an assumed social role, an assumed social mask as well, somehow divorced from his real, genuine,inner self.In short, Elias as a role in a contrived screenplay, is little more "real" than the actual Elias portrayed in the "reality" of the drug smuggling operation itself. Elias, as both portrayed in the film as a figment of a screenwriter's imagination, as a "real" person, using an alias, in a drug smuggling scheme, are equally unreal, equally "inauthentic", as the Existentialists like to say.As such, the character Elias is somewhat reminiscent of the Beatles song "Nowhere Man" which was, coincidentally or not, released in 1966. All the way around, Elias, in this film, is a "Nowhere Man", just as we all are, to a certain extent, as we offer ourselves as the willing pawns of the social institutions, and the social influences all around us in our everyday lives.

Polaris_DiB This may just be a film about roleplaying, but it's some serious work.Three people sit on a train and narrate a movie they want to make, inspired by events around them and another passenger, as well as collaborating and figuring out the details of the narrative as it occurs. Obviously, as the narrative unfolds, things go uber-meta as scenes are acted out later to be thrown away, plot holes are directly pointed out within the narration, and of course as meta always goes within the story within the story are other stories told.However, Robbe-Grillet is not just being silly. The main character's paranoia and distrust runs towards the brink as the movie goes along and every action turns out to be a test, or misdirection, or false plot device. He cannot keep his own role straight, meaning he falls into every trap the mysterious coke dealers set for him as well as gives away everything to a police officer, he cannot remove himself enough emotionally from the mindgames that his roleplaying with the femme fatale comes to a fatal end, and the running train and close-ups on faces punctuating the story show his anxiety and mental breakdown as it seems his fate is, truly, in the hands of flippant writers and outside forces that don't let a man go about minding his own business.Similarly, the focus on bondage is juxtaposed by Robbe-Grillet's almost abject inversion of The Gaze. The Gaze is the term for undercurrent of male-dominated perspective in cinema, as women are treated by the camera as objects to "gaze" at whereas men are typically the ones "gazing". This would seem to be the case here what with the main character's pornography magazine, his roleplaying of rape, and the finale in which that obscure object of desire literally ends up in chains. However, this same protagonist finds himself uneasily the subject of the gaze itself as women, passersby, and the writers continually stare at him with mocking and seductive expressions. The woman he sleeps with herself is in more control of everything going on than he is, and unable to handle that control, he eventually kills her. By the end, he cannot look at a woman without feeling implicated into something, and paranoia sets in.This theme finds its final punctuation in the final scene when the writers brush off their own storytelling as a decent enough yarn, only really interesting simply because it's not real life. Real life then finds the protagonist and the femme fatale as everyday lovers--but their grinning embrace directly into the eye of the camera implicates the audience, because we were not there to see them have a nice day and go about their lives happily ever after, we were there to see them in bondage and self-destruction, and were entertained by those notions.--PolarisDiB

chaos-rampant "Why should I change hotels?" asks the protagonist. "For the sake of changing" comes the reply.That pretty much sums up Alain Robbe-Grillet's audacious followup to his debut. Even though this is my first ARG film I can't say I'm very surprised, as his reputation certainly precedes him. He is after all the man who wrote Marienbad for Resnais, as well as his own romans that burrowed holes within meta-narrative.Two men and a woman, apparently film-makers of some kind, board a coupet of the Trans-Europ-Express train to Paris. While on board, they decide to kill time by improvising a script for a movie - a crime thriller about a man working for a drug trafficking ring and heading to Antwerp on board the Trans-Europ-Express with a bag full of cocaine. Playing on multiple narrative levels, with the film-makers serving as omniscient narrators and creators who create the universe of the story and improvise its details as they go along, even going back and erasing things we've witnessed to accommodate for plot holes and inconsistencies, sketching them again on the spot and presenting us with a pulply crime story torn that constantly shapeshifts before our eyes even as it progresses. Trans-Europ-Express is then in a flux of constant retroactive continuity, expanding simultaneously forwards and backwards from a central (albeit moving) point in time - from the coupet of the train where the three film-makers brainstorm.ARG takes inspiration from surrealist ideas of synchronicity, reveries, the 'passages' of Louis Aragon, the Flauners of Baudelaire and the psychic automatism of André Breton. Or as Tristan Tzara, one of the main theoreticians of Dadaism, wrote in a letter to Breton: "Whatever we see is false". So with the story of Trans-Europ-Express. Jean-Louis Trintignant is shot only to reappear in the final scene hugging the girl he strangled a couple of scenes earlier and which he subsequently saw performing in a BDSM club. Such is the nature of TEE's story.Snippets of cassette playback (as the film-makers rewind it to listen to the notes they've been keeping) coalesce with narration that spills over the fictional story they're creating which in turn becomes real before our eyes as it is acted by Trintignant and the others. ARG's duallistic approach is further transferred on his stylistic choices for the movie. Massive constructions (cranes, ships, dams, old buildings, train stations) depicted in the exteriors while power drills and metallic clangs are audible in the background, cold and clinical interiors.Beautifully photographed by ARG who shows considerable visual talent for a man who studied mathematics and started writing before he stepped behind the camera; finely acted; entertaining despite its convoluted nature and gimmicks; TEE is a minor masterpiece for the adventurous viewer. It still lacks the dramatic punch to take it to the next level though.