Simon is secretly in love with Camille.  Following a misunderstanding, Camille falls in love with Marc.  Marc, a charming estate agent and Simon's boss, is trying to sell an apartment to Odile, Camille's sister.  Odile is determined to buy the apartment, despite the silent disapproval of her husband, Claude.  Claude, an apparently insignificant man, looks unfavorably on the reappearance of Nicolas after many long years.  Nicolas, Odile's old friend, becomes Simon's confidant...

A Conversation with Alain Resnais

How did Same Old Song come about?

Alain Resnais:  After Smoking and No Smoking, Bruno Pesery asked me to film an opera written for the big screen.  It probably would have been easy to finance the project in English but I felt that my knowledge of the language was insufficient for such an undertaking.  I therefore looked for an alternative.  During the work on the adaptation of Intimate Exchanges, the series of plays by Alan Ayckbourn that led to Smoking and No Smoking, I had become close friends with Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri.  I admired the musicality of their dialogue and their performances on stage and screen.  I therefore asked them if they would be interested writing a screenplay.  They replied that they would but, having not appeared in our two "twin films," they didn't want to write for other actors than themselves.  This suited me perfectly.  We then spent three or four afternoons talking about characters, outlines, what we wanted or didn't want to do on film.  We ferreted through my subject box.  I think I even gave the "Jaoui-Bacris" a totally outrageous half-hour improvisation, a little like automatic writing, that I had recorded on audio tape.  The theme of the outer appearances that we wear throughout our lives rose to the surface along with other elements, like a guide and her visits and the psychology of the hermit crab.  Then, as I am a great admirer of the English writer, Dennis Potter, I showed them extracts from his TV films.  In some of them, the characters regularly lip-synch to popular songs.  And gradually, the outline of the film came into shape.  The challenge was the following: how not to copy Potter, given my passion for his work?  We therefore decided to use French songs rooted in an everyday climate, excluding any notion of fantasy.  The songs, with two or three exceptions, don't describe the characters' imaginary world either.  Nicole Vedres, with whom I worked as an assistant in 1947 on Paris Mil Neuf Cent, told me one day that the novel, in its descriptions of love and its melodies, could never match so-called popular or music-hall songs.  And I've often noticed that popular songs accompany the acts of our everyday lives.  If we behaved at all naturally, we'd use song lyrics in conversation.

In you mind and that of the writers, does the choice of song extracts for the action provide a sort of anthology of French song?

Alain Resnais:  No, definitely not.  We didn't aim to have a balanced mix, either on a chronological level or according to the number of songs by a single performer.  The songs that we used are those that came to us naturally, through an association of ideas.  Most of the extracts are very short, sometimes cut in the middle, corresponding to the way our minds work (we rarely remember a whole chorus and even more rarely a verse).  But other extracts are longer.  We didn't set ourselves strict limits.

The members of the audience will probably react differently according to whether they know the songs or not.

Alain Resnais:  We wanted a large number of hits (in particular, so that the audience wouldn't think that the songs had been written for the film) but you can sense a hit even if you've never heard it before.  I knew nothing of some of the songs suggested by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri but if I felt that they were hits when listening to them, I'd immediately endorse them.

Your love of musicals is well known and yet it is hard to find an illusion to the genre in Same Old Song.

Alain Resnais:  I was particularly determined not to stray into that area.  A musical almost always contains dancing or at least movements and gestures by actors to evoke dancing.  Once again, we were aiming for a more everyday style.  We wanted the songs to enter the scenes without any warning.  If the audience, even only once or twice, could forget that it was hearing a song and think that the words were dialogue, then we would be happy.

 Interview by François Thomas

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