Life of Riley

Life of Riley (2014)

Aimer, boire et chanter

In the midst of rehearsals for a new play, amateur dramatics proponents Colin and Kathryn receive the shattering news that their friend George is fatally ill and only has a few months to live.

Date of release
2014-03-26
TMDB
5.2 / 10 (48)
Runtime
1h 48m
Genres
Comedy, Drama
Director
Alain Resnais

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Life of Riley
  • Filmed in: Cité du Cinéma

Life of Riley is a 2014 French comedy-drama film directed by Alain Resnais in his final feature film before his death. Adapted from the play Life of Riley by Alan Ayckbourn, the film had its premiere in the competition section of the 64th Berlin International Film Festival, just three weeks before Resnais died, where it won the Alfred Bauer Prize.

Production

Resnais said that he was drawn to Ayckbourn's play Life of Riley by its portrayal of a group of characters who are constantly mistaken about the behaviour and motives of the others and about their own; it questions whether people really match the descriptions which others give of them.

For the third film in succession, Resnais (using his writer's pseudonym of Alex Reval) worked with the writer/director Laurent Herbiet on the screenplay of Aimer, boire et chanter, remaining faithful to the text of Ayckbourn's play (except for some shortening) and preserving its English setting in Yorkshire.

In choosing four of his cast with whom he had previously worked (Sabine Azéma, André Dussollier, Hippolyte Girardot, and Michel Vuillermoz), Resnais was conscious of assigning them roles in this film which would allow them to give performances distinctly different from what they had done before. Caroline Silhol had worked once for Resnais many years earlier, and Sandrine Kiberlain was the only complete newcomer to his team.

Resnais wanted to film in a studio in order to preserve a theatrical style of décor which matched Ayckbourn's dialogue, but budget constraints made it impossible to build full sets of the houses of the various couples. He therefore took inspiration from his teenage memory of a stage production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull for which Georges Pitoëff had used pieces of fabric to give minimal indication of settings.

For the title of the film, Resnais chose Aimer, boire et chanter, to convey something of the spirit of the otherwise untranslatable original title. It is also the French title of a waltz by Johann Strauss II, which is heard during several scene transitions; and a vocal version with French words by Lucien Boyer is sung during the final credits in a recording by the tenor Georges Thill.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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