Here’s all I wrote when I watched this three years ago: High Modernism in movie form. Like a trip to the Whitney Museum. I’m still digesting this, it is troubling, but I enjoyed it enough that I plan to watch it again with the commentary track. Well, I did listen to the commentary track and, as so often happens when the track is of a British film scholar, I am now convinced this is one of the greatest works of art of all time. That will fade; however, it is still a great film. A masterpiece of restraint — images and information are doled out just a morsel at a time. The music, performances, photography — a crystalline time capsule of a glorious moment in high art. The staircases! The hotel lobby! The nightclub with the high glass ceiling! The opening credit font! Jesus Lord, I LOVE that fucking font! It’s funny, because I could engage the film the way, I’m sure, Resnais and Marguerite Duras wished it; to talk about memory and regret and longing and specious time and Henri Bergson and pacifism and nationalism and blunt sex and pride and a lack of communication in postwar Europe. And yeah, it’s all in there. But this movie will always be about that font. If Dave Brubeck were a font, if Franz Kline were a font. . .if the second floor of the Noguchi Museum were a font. . .if Alain Resnais were a font. . .he’d be the font at the head of this, his greatest movie. . .and perhaps the greatest movie representing whatever it is that that font somehow represents to me. (The film has been quoted all over the place, whether you realize it or not. The best, of course, is here part of this.