Je T’aime, Je T’aime

Deserving a secure place within the science fiction canon, Alain Resnais’ beguiling Je t’aime, je t’aime is a landmark example of how film can replicate the evanescence and power of memory. A failed suicide attempt leads Claude Ridder—played by Claude Rich—to a hospital where he is approached by doctors searching for the perfect human time travel subject. Their machine was designed to send a subject back exactly one minute, but the experiment malfunctions, and Claude’s jumbled memories suddenly all seem like the present. Claude becomes trapped reliving one pivotal point in his life and must choose a path forward with the woman around whom all his memories revolve. Drawn to the mundane, Resnais lingers on the trivial—the small moments that accumulate to give substance and texture to memory—as if attempting to precisely measure the significance of one life’s every minute.