The stubbornly stubborn Alain Resnais, who died last year at the age of 91, made his name by subverting expectations and dodging down unanticipated narrative alleyways.
Still, there were few more surprising turns in his career than a declared affection for Yorkshire farceur Ayckbourn. Resnais' final film ended up being his third assault on an Ayckbourn play and, though hardly in the window-rattling mode of Hiroshima mon Amour or Last Year at Marienbad, Life of Riley is a diverting trifle with a sliver of mortal terror at its heart.
The film concerns three couples adrift in the North of England united by their relationship to the titular – and entirely unseen – Riley, who has just six months to live. In a typically playful Ayckbourn touch, much of the action concerns an amateur production of the same writer's 1965 play Relatively Speaking. The director adds abstract flash to the backgrounds and a comedy mole to the foreground as he revels in the accumulating confusion.
Fans of the playwright will enjoy the familiar, complex social intersections – exercised most flamboyantly in 1973's The Norman Conquest – that stress how little couples really know about one another. Enthusiasts for Resnais will enjoy the self-conscious engagement with the nature of theatricality.
The film isn’t quite funny enough. The ambiguity as to location – this is an awfully French version of Yorkshire – is more unsettling than any more radical experiment in Resnais’ early serious films. But this remains a playful work that confirms the master never lost his (oh, why not?) joie de vivre.
