Un bruit qui rend fou

A typical Alain Robbe-Grillet game of self-fertilization and self-destruction of the narrative instance of the work, following the pattern of Maurits Cornelis Escher's drawings, supplemented with pervasive uncertainty both in terms of motivation and the characters' identities. In Un bruit qui rend fou ("An insupportable noise" or literally "Noise, which drives one mad"), the noise referring to the game of mahjong serves as an internal duplication of the very principle of constructing this film (and all the author's other films) in the sense of continuous recombination of basic thematic coordinates. However, the traditional theme of doppelganger and schizoid fragmentation of characters is recuperated too much in Robbe-Grillet's terms, almost too much in the style of poetic surrealism, which leads to the impression of a revived fairy tale about the return of ghosts, etc., while the author's greatest historical contribution in his greatest films lies in the fact that he does not create that sense of "magical realism" through content ambiguity, but only through a formal play with montage, sharp cuts, and the autonomy of the sound component... Here we are dealing with more of a magical realism for the masses, and delirious consciousness is not given by a mere linear game with montage and incompatible time, but rather by the delirium of feverish love 'in the time of cholera' - thanks to which this film is also one of Robbe-Grillet's more accessible films. (22.01.2024)