Eureka! Entertainment have announced the UK theatrical release of LIFE OF RILEY (Aimer, boire et chanter), Alain Resnais’ (Last Year at Marienbad, Hiroshima mon amour) final film before his death in March 2014 is a moving, graceful, and surprisingly affirmative farewell to life from a truly great artist.
After Smoking/No Smoking (1993) and Private Fears in Public Places (2006), this is the late Alain Resnais’s thirdnadaptation of a work by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn and the great master’s last film. By confining the action to an artificial, almost entirely studio-bound world, he succeeds in creating a tragicomic theatre of vanities. Employing the ironic distance of a sage observer of human nature, Resnais ponders the power of love and desire and in doing so enables his characters, driven by their longings, hopes and obsessions, to leave the beaten track for once
In the Yorkshire countryside, the life of three couples is upset for a few months, from Spring to Fall, by the enigmatic behaviour of their friend George Riley.When general practitioner Dr. Colin inadvertently tells his wife Kathryn that the days of his patient George Riley should be numbered, he doesn’t know that George was Kathryn’s first love. Both spouses, who are rehearsing a play with their local amateur theatre company, convince George to join them. It allows George, among other things, to play strong love scenes with Tamara, who is married to Jack, his best friend, a
rich businessman and unfaithful husband.
A tearful Jack tries to persuade Monica, George’s wife who left him to be with Simeon the farmer, to go back to her husband in order to support him during his last months. George has a strange seductive power over Monica, Tamara and Kathryn, which highly upsets those men sharing their lives with the three women.
Which one will George Riley take on holidays in Tenerife with him?
If you missed LIFE OF RILEY at the recent UK French film festival, it will be released in selected cinemas nationwide in the UK and Ireland on 6 March 2015, starring Sabine Azéma, Hippolyte Girardot, Caroline Sihol.
