N. Took the Dice (1972) User Reviews

Some impresive beautiful images, a companion piece to L'Eden et après

[Falkner1976 · 6/10 · 27 March 2024]

Robbe-Grillet chooses a character, N from Nemo or the narrator..., to play with the material shot between Tunisia and Paris for the film L'eden et après.

N plays dice and invents his story with each roll.

The material ranges from beautiful images of the Tunisian coast to the usual female nudes in repulsively tortured poses.

The intention is first of all to disconcert, but some scenes are ridiculously comical (that funeral, those seventies dances at the Mondrian café...). It is a problem shared with L'Eden et après, with other works by Robbe-Grillet and with many films (especially French) of the 70s.

Obviously there is a lot of eroticism, sometimes downright unhealthy, and the beautiful Catherine Jourdan once again walks around in a trance or writhes in terror, dressed mainly from knees to toes and occasionally soaked.

Everything seems to be based on the appeal of images that have a vague narrative load, but without ever becoming part of a coherent story, or being able to start saying the opposite of what we imagine, the interest of scenes that at most mean in themselves, without ever being able to definitively fix them in a context.

Everything has a tone of play, of intelligent mockery, has frequently an undeniable beauty and is a very interesting curiosity to accompany the viewing of L'Eden et après.

L'éden et après Recut

[Perception_de_Ambiguity · 8/10 · 27 March 2011]

Robbe is a *bleeping* bastard. Making a nice to look at and sort of interesting but somewhat empty film first just to later make another film with the "same footage" (I'll come back to this later) that builds on the knowledge the viewer has from the first film and makes it an intellectually rich, associative extravaganza. Instead of misleadingly showing the coffeehouse scenes first and the fantasy later like in 'Eden and After' (a structure that makes the long fantasy scenes far outstay their welcome, IMO) the fantasy footage is directly juxtaposed with the corresponding scenes in the coffeehouse, especially in the first half of the film. He makes no secret of the oriental scenes being part of a game the characters play. What sounds like "dumbing down" in fact makes for a wild, free-flowing structure with little to hold on to if you haven't seen 'Eden and After'. In the mind of the viewer the first movie is always an integral part of this one.

What I read about it before watching it made it sound like it mostly just takes footage from 'Eden and After' and rearranges it to fit some pattern to evoke different emotions and create new meaning compared to the first film. This makes it sound like an experiment in editing and structure more than anything else, something that is more fun for the creator than for the viewer. But it's a lot more than just a different movie by design. What seems to have happened here is that Robbe took all the footage he shot for 'Eden and After' and made a different film out of it through the magic of editing. There isn't all that much footage from 'Eden and After', maybe even none at all, it's difficult to tell without an in-depth comparison because of all the alternate takes. But there are also many scenes that don't have an equivalent in 'Eden and After', even if the settings are largely the same, naturally.

There is some dialogue between the characters in the movie although you almost never SEE them talk because they are off-screen at the moment they open their mouths or you see them from behind and so on. See what happened there? That afterthought-dub isn't done perfectly, sometimes it doesn't really seem to match with what the actors play (eg.: the character delivers his dialogue furiously but visually he looks considerably more calm) but you certainly get the idea of who says what and what's going on. The film is mostly narrated by the "dice thrower", though, who kind of takes the position of the filmmaker. His narration, sometimes on-screen, sometimes through voice-over, often helps by sort of giving you the idea of the theme that links those images together and raises some interesting questions on the way.

What's also interesting is that I have a VHS rip that is different to the DVD version, apart from being fullscreen and looking awful. At least the opening is very different, it uses alternate takes (yes, again) although the rhythm and structure is very much maintained. It would be interesting to further explore the differences between those two versions.

And so I'll leave you with the narrator's final words.

"The images that your eyes steal here and there are only images. They have no meaning attached as an inherent nature. They have no other significance than that which you choose to give. An order that's reassuring or desperate. It's you who makes it. Out of laziness...or fear."

Chance and Happenstance

[lmnyc · 17 June 2002]

This film is evidently a reworking of Robbe-Grillet's previous film "L' Éden et après", using alternate takes and re-editing that has the order of scenes to be governed by 'a throw of the dice' (shown in new footage). It is officially unavailable on viideo of DVD, but can be found on second-generation video prints on Ebay, etc.