059: J'taime J'taime (1968): An Excellent Adventure

Ellen, Paul and James take on Je t’aime, je t’aime, Alain Resnais’s unsettling and deeply original twist on time travel.

A man agrees to take part in an experiment that will send him one year into the past for one minute. It goes wrong. Instead of returning safely, he is pulled through fragments of his own memories, especially moments from a complicated relationship, replayed out of order and slightly differently each time.

In this episode, the team explore how Resnais turns a simple science fiction premise into a study of memory, regret and repetition, and ask whether this is really a film about time travel at all, or about being stuck with the past.