Word: grillet
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...September 14, 1966, at twenty-five minutes to midnight, thinking that it was an eternal ice-cream cone, an eternal ice, an eternal yellow-white flavour?"). He is also adept at playing those "In" games French readers love, the sounding of literary resonances from Pascal to Robbe-Grillet...
Trans-Europ Express is a spoof of the spoof-suspense films presented in the Robbe-Grillet manner-which is to say that plot, character and motivation are kept at considerably more than arm's length. Strictly speaking, there are no characters at all, except Author-Director Robbe-Grillet, Producer Samy Helfon and a female assistant, played by Robbe-Grillet's wife Catherine. These three gather in a compartment of the Trans-Europ Express en route from Paris to Antwerp...
...This train is terrific," says Robbe-Grillet. "Maybe we ought to do a film about it." They proceed to rough out the beginnings of a plot into the girl's handy tape recorder while the express rattles along. Actor Jean-Louis Trintignant (A Man and a Woman) happens to be on board, and they decide that he is Elias, a dope runner on his first job for a big syndicate. Whereupon the camera picks up Trintignant sneaking furtively around the station, exchanging recognition signals and suitcases with sinister strangers and extracting a pistol from a hollowed-out book...
...stock shenanigans pile up, the film shifts back to Robbe-Grillet and Helfon, who discuss whether to have Elias smuggling diamonds instead of dope. Eventually, they decide to forget about an agent who has just gone through Elias' luggage, and generally continue to improvise scene after scene...
...moviemakers as Hitchcock and Godard. Spoofy sex is provided by toothsome Marie-France Pisier as a double-agent prostitute, plus the deadpan hero's fatal fetish for naked girls locked up in chains. There is some excellent photography and a surprise-on-surprise ending that confuses even Robbe-Grillet...