Alain Resnais -
‘The Poet Director’

After waiting more than a decade to work on the right project with Alain Resnais, whom Bogarde dubbed ‘The Poet-Director’ (Shivas, 4), they found it in the form of David Mercer’s Providence (1978). Considered one of Bogarde’s and Resnais' finest films, it has a complex psychological layering, dark humour, a jungle-like, phantasmagoric landscape, marvellous interior sets designed with a surreal quality to serve as organic backdrops for each psychological scene, and is enveloped in a score by Miklós Rózsa. Bogarde gave a tour-de-force performance, deftly shifting between reality and the various nightmare versions of his character conjured up by his writer-father during a drunken, all-night stupor to forget the pain in his decaying body, and distorted by guilt-driven angst over past neglectful relationships with his son and family. For Bogarde, ‘It was exactly the film I had always hoped to be a part of for it did all that I ever desired a film to do. It disturbed, educated and illuminated, and above all it made me laugh . . . The wait of a decade had been worth every minute and I had, at last, achieved what was perhaps my greatest ambition as an actor; to work with Alain Resnais. It was, I couldn’t help thinking, a hell of a long way from being “The Idol of the Odeons”.’ (An Orderly Man, 240-241)