Playing with Fire

(Le Jeu avec le feu, Alain Robbe-Grillet, France/Italy, 1975)

Noises Off

The fact that much of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s cinema work doesn’t ever really catch fire for me is something of a standing mystery: from his patient descriptions of how they are generated, the way in which formal structures create discontinuous narrative content, and the radical use of fantasticated spaces and audiovisual montage, it should get me in. But it so rarely does.

Compared to, particularly, Raúl Ruiz – the two were friends, their films overlap in many aspects, and they respected each other as France’s only resident “anti-Bazinians” – there’s a certain cinematic facility and élan that’s irretrievably lacking for me in Robbe-Grillet. And, try as I might to empathetically enter the headspace of his most voluble cine-enthusiasts (whether Royal S. Brown at the Melbourne Cinesonic conference of 1998 or Tim Lucas on multiple BFI DVD audio commentaries), I am never very convinced that all the form-content relations actually work, that they are articulated satisfyingly, or that or spark any inner momentum. These experts lay it all out for me, but the elements never mesh in the subsequent replay.

Playing with Fire is Robbe-Grillet’s absolute worst film. Essentially, it’s a comedy. In interviews, he refuses to discuss the topic of humour – you’re either going to get the jokes, or not – but he will admit to the inherently Duchampian playfulness and wit (we hope!) of modern art, and to his enjoyment in making just about all his films beyond the first-time-out trauma of L’Immortelle in 1963. There’s improvisation, he assures us – especially when Jean-Louis Trintignant is in frame – and there’s the merriment occasioned by serendipitous accidents. It’s not all pre-planned and foreseen in the script … usually.

But Playing with Fire sure does not play that way. One of the most incisive negative commentaries on it came, at the moment of its initial release, from Positif contributor (from the early 1950s to 2020!) Albert Bolduc, who took a keen interest in the pan-European erotica hitting screens at that point of the mid ‘70s. The method of Robbe-Grilletian cine-construction is always the same, and never renewed, in Bolduc’s eyes.

At the outset, there are situations, characters and décors borrowed from the noir genre as taken in its largest (and hence inexact) sense: the works of Sade, Gothic novels, the great American crime films, and the most mediocre French polars are all in the mix. The filmmaker sets about messing up the intrigue and the characters’ behaviour by passing (for instance) from one level to another out of those offered in the initial spread. Now, this second level may serve as either the debasement or the parody of the first. If it’s parody – which is clearly the better option – then a certain drollness may eventuate. (Positif, no. 167, March 1975)

Bolduc thus funds himself amused by certain lines of dialogue – like “Don’t act stupid in this sacred site!” uttered during a wedding in in a grand church – or a few of the less hammy performers, such as Jacques Doniol-Valcroze as an investigative cop. But most often, Bolduc claims, it’s the tendency to debasement that triumphs over the taste for parody. Meaning: you can’t take the slightest scrap of the narrative premise seriously, because Robbe-Grillet certainly doesn’t (check out the ‘car chase’ finale). It’s all – to underline a treacherous phrase from the lexicon of French criticism, since it can be wielded either to praise or to damn – a game with clichés.

The enforced (or allowed) ham acting certainly doesn’t help. But there are worse matters afoot. For the histrionic performances are fully tied to a certain, iron-clad syntax imposed as a ‘generative matrix’ by the auteur in all his films. Everything that happens in his work – every jolt, every cut almost – serves as either a connector or a shifter. A scene or a moment is coming to its ‘natural’ end (if it can be said that there’s anything natural in Playing with Fire): suddenly there’s a strange, unidentifiable noise (or music blast) courtesy of his celebrated sonic collaborator, Michel Fano – a noise off that causes an actor or three to suddenly swivel the head and fire their gaze outside the frame. It’s a running gag about Hitchcockian-thriller connectivity: the lure of the off-space, its temptations and dangers, threading one shot onto the next.

But these connectors, in R-G, are usually also shifters: we cut to somewhere else, some other temporal-spatial fragment altogether, or the actor will flick a fourth-wall-breaking gaze (ahem, ‘Godardian’) into the camera, or even deliver a commentary on the intrusive element (on the order of “That’s untranslatable” or “I didn’t understand the narrative” – like the worst 1st-year film-school-student films). Connectors and shifters: all of them delivered within heavy quotation marks. The result is very silly (determinedly so), to the extent that it borders, at times, on a Benny Hill TV sketch – you keep waiting for the dreaded fast-motion and the wacky-sax music to start, as the various cops and terrorists race around fields, station platforms and construction sites. We even get, at the nadir, the abstract ‘free montage’ of a line of stuffy guys turning their heads this way and that. Oh boy!

For R-G, no dispositif is more tried and true than a story-being-composed-within-the-story. The blank hero in L’Immortelle (Doniol-Valcroze again) is seen looking out a window from a dark room – so the entire, ensuing plot could be his projection, his imagination. In The Man Who Lies (1968), it’s the particular form of storytelling expressed as compulsive lying which triggers the uncertain status of all things represented. In Playing for Fire, the sight of a dour banker-patriarch (played by a visibly uncomfortable Philippe Noiret) constantly scribbling and reading-aloud at a desk – not to mention shooting us knowing shifter-glances – is enough to spin the possibility-probability that much of the erotica plot (Paris Opera as perverse sex dungeon) is merely ‘what he has written’.

That’s why there are doubles of Noiret (and of Trintignant) hopping about like multiplying bunnies in a Tex Avery cartoon. And that’s how this auteur can (once more) ‘play with the fire’ of busting through the incest taboo on an undecidable fantasy-reality plane – whilst simultaneously stoking a ‘feminist’ escape-engine involving the vengeful turns taken by the daughter-figure (Anicée Alvina from the director’s previous Successive Slidings of Pleasure [1974]). Somewhere in that opportunistic shuffle-board game is also placed a rather superfluous bit of very ‘70s Night Porter-type Nazi chic/fascinating-fascism shock tactics (Alvina wanted to dress up in the uniform, R-G says, so why not let her?).

As well as the éventail of literary and filmic genres inventoried by Bolduc above, there’s also, in the combinatory machine conjured by Robbe-Grillet, pictorial references (paintings plaster every surface); particular songs or pieces of music (Verdi’s Il Trovatore, the German Wehrmacht anthem “Erika”, and the Brazilian song “Carolina”) often cut up into the tiniest connector-shifter bits and overlaid on each other by Fano; and ‘mythic’ material of various kinds, from Greek myths to Freudian case studies, via various operatic templates and reworkings. A little like in Jean-Claude Brisseau’s films – except that J-CB is a truly gifted filmmaker, fully invested in whatever he is narrating.

In Robbe-Grillet, on the contrary, it’s all grist to the mill; nothing matters. Trintignant and Alvina will just drive away from the pile-up at the end like in the memory of a carefree Godard movie of early-to-mid ‘60s – but the ultimate effect is (to riff on Bolduc’s formulation) not liberating, transgressive flames, but a fatal (because ennui-inducing) deep-freeze.

© Adrian Martin 21 August 2025