You ain’t seen nothing yet in Cannes!

French director Alain Resnais at 90 years old shows at the Cannes Film Festival he’s still very much in the game. And game is the operative word in his film in competition this year, Vous n’avez encore rien vu – You ain’t seen nothing yet in English.

Festival de Cannes

Resnais gathers his favourite home-grown actors for his trademark love of cinema games.

The pretext for the gathering is the death of a stage director they have all worked with in the past on the Jean Anouih’s 1941 resistance allegory of the Greek tragedies, Eurydice.

The actors play themselves, playing their roles in Eurydice. They enter the last home of the late director, as if they were entering a theatre foyer.

Setting the scene for the filming of a multi-layered mise-en-abyme with more than one pair of mirrors, and not all set at the same angle. The actors are moved around from a private screening room with its dark soft sofas, and stage sets of a hotel room and a station waiting room.

The actors watch a film of a new production of Eurydice and are cast back to their own renditions of the main roles, Eurydice and Orpheus, played by Lambert Wilson, Sabine Azema, Pierre Arditi and Anne Cosigny.

They repeat, echo or take up cues from the contemporary film version, with a real-time exchange at one point, between the screen characters and the stage artists.

For the fifth time in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, Resnais still manages to surprise. He saves the big one for the end.

One final dramatic touch which a fair number of people at the screening missed, because they fell for the dramatic illusion from one of France’s most playful arthouse French directors.