The Eden is a café adjacent to a college, and the students like to spend their time there, including Violette (Catherine Jourdan), who becomes intrigued by a man she meets who she thinks is called Duchemin (Pierre Zimmer). In the meantime, to stave off their boredom the students stage a gang rape of one of their number, not only the male ones either as two of the women hold the victim's arms while the ordeal is taking place, though after it is over it might as well not have happened at all, such is the apathy all involved feel. Their studies are little better as calculus proves less than interesting, but then again when they do seek thrills, the likes of Russian roulette aren't enough either...
By the time Alain Robbe-Grillet, an author turned filmmaker whose best known work remains his script for the classic art movie Last Year at Marienbad, made Eden and After his themes and motifs were very much set out from film to film, and you could make a checklist of various aspects which were sure to turn up if you had watched his other directorial efforts. Which oddly was precisely what he did in lieu of an actual script for Eden and After, or L'éden et après if you preferred the French title as he had grown fascinated by modern forms of classical music which he applied to his methods when he crafted this, relying on improvisation once he, his crew and cast were ready to shoot.
For this reason it came across as if Robbe-Grillet was translating his recurring dreams into movies, and certainly there was a texture of a dream when experiencing them, moving from nightmare to a more pleasant form, yet even as it did we were well aware events could shift back into the sinister at the drop of a hat. As he worked down his agenda, the heroine found herself dragged from pillar to post as she actually made her way through a plot that could quite possibly have operated as a pastiche of the Hitchcockian thriller, much in the same manner genre filmmakers around the world had been aping the Master of Suspense for a number of years before this was released. It was all there: the ice cool blonde (Jourdan), the dead body, the MacGuffin (this time a painting), an exotic location (Tunisia) too.
It was simply the ultimate goals that were different, as while Alfred Hitchcock was manufacturing commercial entertainments, Robbe-Grillet was dedicated to more experimental techniques. Both men were no less caught up in their psychological preoccupations and games playing, but you wouldn't get Eden and After proving a blockbuster with the patrons at your local fleapit. Especially when the most receptive audience for this wasn't the mass audience, it was the director himself: he appeared to be creating these works solely for his own amusement and if he managed to discombobulate or stimulate any potential viewers, so much the better, though its was not uppermost in his mind. Indeed, it was more likely that sitting through this would generate a negative reaction in most.
Violette navigates her way through various scenes which would operate perfectly well as clips from other movies, be they a thriller (as when she is chased around a factory, or when she finds the body of Duchemin lying next to the river outside) to a softcore pornography quickie (by the point we are in the second half, Robbe-Grillet appears to have completely given in to his sexual fantasies), with various points of travelogue and even impossible to read symbolism, as when Violette often encounters fairly large quantities of sperm, either lying around or in a bucket: when she starts rubbing the substance over herself you have to hope it was some gelatinous substitute the actress was using, otherwise... ew. The leading lady actually cuts a lonely figure through this often hostile landscape, and when digressions arise, such as the pair of old friends who greet one another then a minute later are trying to stab themselves to death on a beach, they don't do anything to improve her sense of isolation in a world that has gone ever so slightly bonkers. Music by Michel Fano.
