‘Private Fears’ in solitary places

There’s a beguiling resonance and effortlessness to films of master directors who have enjoyed long and venturesome careers. That is certainly the case with “Private Fears in Public Places,” the latest film from Alain Resnais, the French New Wave pioneer whose highly stylized and experimental “Hiroshima Mon Amour” and “Last Year at Marienbad” were staples of repertory art theaters for years.

For more than half a century, Resnais has made important and innovative films -- 16 features and countless shorts -- and in recent years has ventured into musicals, intrigued with the relationship between stage and screen, playing the artifice of theater against film’s easy simulation of reality. (He has said that employing the artificialities of the theater has allowed him to create “a movement back and forth between identification and distance, between sympathy and antipathy” for his characters.) In any event, “Private Fears in Public Places” is an adaptation (by Jean-Michel Ribes) of an Alan Ayckbourn play so cinematic that it could stand as a treatise on how translation to the screen can bring added dimension and meaning to theatrical material.

“Private Fears in Public Places” is a cascading series of interconnected stories set in present-day Paris, involving seven people whose lives affect one another’s although they do not all know one another. It is the gentlest of films, finding humor in these individuals longing to break out of their solitary states. For most of its two hours it plays like a comedy, but its conclusion, evoking the utmost poignancy, serves as a reminder that from the start it has been the human comedy in the most philosophical sense of the term that has engaged Ayckbourn and Resnais, a longtime admirer of the British playwright -- his 1993 “Smoking/No Smoking” was also an adaptation from Ayckbourn. “Private Fears in Public Places” is a film that Jean Renoir would have appreciated.

Andre Dussolier’s Thierry, a silver-haired real estate agent polite to the point of diffidence, shows apartments to Laura Morante’s Nicole, but they’re all too small. The irony is that Nicole may not be needing a bigger place because her longtime relationship with Dan (Lambert Wilson) seems to be rapidly disintegrating. Dan, a senior career officer, has been dismissed from the army because of a scrape involving soldiers under his command and in his devastated state has been finding it difficult to go out and find a job.

Meanwhile, Thierry is smitten with his lovely but very proper and deeply religious assistant Charlotte (Sabine Azema), whose devoutness has driven her to sign on as a part-time caretaker for the impossibly nasty and obstreperous bedridden father (Claude Rich, never seen but heard loud and clear) of the handsome, middle-aged Lionel (Pierre Arditi), a bartender at a posh hotel cafe, a man as kindly and deferential as Thierry. Thierry, in turn, lives with his beautiful sister Gaelle (Isabelle Carre), who could easily be 30 years his junior; no wonder their relationship is more that of a father and daughter.

Various developments do -- and don’t -- come to fruition, with Charlotte proving to be not what she seems in a manner that moves from amusing to downright disturbing. All these people are caught in the grip of loneliness, but Charlotte’s extravagant religiosity has left her with a deeply divided personality.

Resnais doesn’t merely tell their stories but expresses their plight with stunning visual imagination. A whole thesis could be -- and probably will be -- written on how Resnais uses space, or rather spaces, to express his characters’ predicaments and to define their relationships to each other. He sometimes resorts to overhead shots of the sets of the apartments Thierry is showing Nicole to reveal just how cramped they are, and throughout the film, room dividers of every sort, not to mention outright walls, are constantly separating people. Never for a moment are these images lingered over as Resnais proceeds with a brisk, graceful flow from one scene, each sequence punctuated with a shot of falling snow. Resnais demands and receives tremendous vitality and nuance from his cast, several of whom have worked with him numerous times. “Private Fears in Public Places,” a masterpiece by any measure, is fresh, immediate and contemporary, but its wintry yet warm perspective is suffused with the wisdom and experience of a great filmmaker who turns 85 on June 2.

“Private Fears in Public Places.” MPAA rating: unrated. Some sexuality, language. Running time: 2 hours. In French with English subtitles. Exclusively at Laemmle’s Playhouse Cinemas, 673 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 844-6500; Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869; Town Center, 17200 Ventura Blvd.; Encino, (818) 981-9811.