In each case, Robbe-Grillet subverts expectations and still ends up with neat little 90-minute works, whose non-naturalistic editing and creative use of sound make them highly absorbing.

L'Immortelle disrupts the conventions of a heart-warming Hollywood romance Trans-Europ-Express is a Jean-Pierre Melville crime thriller (complete with raincoats) turned inside-out The Man Who Lies is a bizarre refashioning of a “resistance” film, a quasi-genre often characterised as the French equivalent of a Western. (As Catherine Robbe-Grillet remarks in one of the DVD extras, her husband's previous film had been dedicated to Breton.)ĭespite this highbrow frippery, these early films are all idiosyncratic pastiches of popular genres. It's a relationship with the city that recalls André Breton's surrealist novel Nadja, the story of a love affair that is really about Breton's love for Paris. We soon start to wonder if any of their encounters ever took place at all. The real romance is clearly with the city of Istanbul, where Robbe-Grillet had met his wife Catherine a few years before: its waterways, cafés and mosques, steeped in dreams and exoticism, become the setting for the Frenchman's desperate search for the woman after her sudden disappearance. It feels inappropriate to refer to the film's “story,” but the theme of L'Immortelle, such as it is, is a frustrated love affair between a Frenchman and a mysterious, unplaceable woman-a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Euridice. L'Immortelle shares Marienbad's unsettling atmosphere and intentional staginess, but, like its more famous cousin, it does achieve a quietly mesmeric effect.

L'Immortelle, set in Istanbul, had been put on hold because of political unrest in Turkey, and was finally made in 1963. Marienbad was not the first film Robbe-Grillet had written.

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