Directed by:
Alain Robbe-GrilletScreenplay:
Alain Robbe-GrilletCinematography:
Willy KurantComposer:
Michel FanoCast:
Jean-Louis Trintignant, Marie-France Pisier, Daniel Emilfork, Henri Lambert, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Charles Millot, Christian Barbier, Raoul Guylad (more)VOD (1)
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This stylish, cult 1966 erotic thriller stars French new wave icons Jean-Louis Trintignant and Marie-France Pisier. Trintignant plays a drug courier smuggling a stash of cocaine from Paris to Antwerp on the Trans-Europ-Express. Matters are complicated by surreal encounters with police, three filmmakers who are also on the train making a film about drug-traffickers and erotic-fantasy sequences featuring Pisier being bound and subjected to Trintignant's will. Originally banned by the BBC for scenes of sexual sadism and bondage, Trans-Europ-Express was written and directed by ground-breaking and daring filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, best known for his experimental novels, and for writing Alain Resnais Last Year at Marienbad. (British Film Institute (BFI))
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This film not only plays a game with genres, seriousness, and frivolity, but also with itself. Describing the film within the film does not even come close to exhausting it: yes, the basic axis of cinematic dynamics is formed by the "fictional" story = Trintignant and the drug trade, narrated by a group of filmmakers on a train = as if portrayed "reality," in which the film within the film is supposed to take place (the storyline with Trintignant). But there is still a third level, which makes something non-autonomous primarily from the initial, seemingly "real" level (because in conventional artistic creation, it is presented as a reproduction of reality), because it is derived, unreal, because it is also imagined. This is the level of countless metafictional and alienating effects that not only undermine the foundational layer of "reality" (and which most films, determined to use such methods, end with) but necessarily also the plane of the "fictional" film within the film. Due to this alienating level, there is no fixed place from which a whole story could be credibly logically narrated and be based on a rational sequence of time and character behavior. Because of this fact, both Trintignant and the group of filmmakers are captives of the film author's will, or rather film fantasy as such.
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Photo © Como Film Production
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