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Eden and After
Eden and After
	Theatrical release poster
French	L'Eden et après
Directed by	Alain Robbe-Grillet
Story by	Alain Robbe-Grillet
Produced by	Samy Halfon [fr]
Starring	Catherine Jourdan; Pierre Zimmer; Juraj Kukura; Catherine Robbe-Grillet
Cinematography	Igor Luther [fr; de]
Edited by	Bob Wade
Music by	Michel Fano
Distributed by	Plan Film (France); Mundial Films (USA)
Release date	20 April 1970 (France);
Running time	100 minutes
Countries	France; Czechoslovakia;
Languages	French; Slovak;

Eden and After (French: L'Eden et après) is a 1970 French–Czechoslovak drama art film directed by French novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet. It was entered into the main competition of the 20th Berlin International Film Festival.^[3]

The film's plot follows a group of university students, led by the central character Violette, who engage in enigmatic rituals at a café called Eden. Instead of writing a detailed script for the film, Robbe-Grillet created a story through the composer Arnold Schoenberg's system for the twelve-tone technique and based the film's plot on the result. Since the project lacked a proper script, Robbe-Grillet had to hire obscure actors for most of the roles.

Plot

A group of university students meet after class at a café called Eden, where they perform enigmatic rituals and games—such as a simulated Russian roulette or pretending one of them has been poisoned to death. One evening an older stranger named Duchemin enters Eden and engages them in magic tricks. He asks them to pick up broken glass pieces with bare hands and heals the resulting cut wounds instantly, a trick he says he learned in Africa. He offers a drug he calls "fear powder", which one of the students, Violette, takes. She hallucinates, terrified by lurid visions of torture and murder, but soon bursts out laughing. She agrees to meet Duchemin later at night in an abandoned factory, where she gets lost upon arrival. After going through a series of hallucinatory visions, which includes a semen-like substance oozing from a pipe, she exits the factory next morning. Duchemin is found dead at the foot of a staircase overlooking the nearby canal. She finds a postcard from Tunisia in his pocket.

Returning home, she discovers that she has been robbed of a valuable painting. She leaves for Tunisia, where she meets Duchemin's doppelgänger named Dutchman and becomes his lover. A gang of thugs who seem like the students she was with at Eden kidnap her. Imprisoned and subjected to torture, she manages to free herself with the help of a doppelgänger of hers. Violette recovers the painting and finds Dutchman dead at the foot of a staircase by the sea, which reminds her of the place where she found Duchemin's body earlier.

Back home, Violette narrates that nothing has happened yet or perhaps everything was just a fantasy, hallucination, or premonitory dream of hers.

Cast

Catherine Jourdan as Violette
Pierre Zimmer as Duchemin/Dutchman
Richard Leduc as Marc-Antoine
Lorraine Rainer as Marie-Eve
Sylvain Corthay as Jean-Pierre
Juraj Kukura as Boris
Jarmila Koleničová (credited as Jarmila Kolenicová) as Sona
Catherine Robbe-Grillet as "Foolish woman"
François Gervai
Ľudovít Kroner (credited as Ludwik Kroner) as Franc

Voice actors for the Slovak release

Ida Rapaičová as Violette/Viola
Slavo Drozd as Duchemin/Durman
Božidara Turzonovová as Marie-Eve/Mária
Ivan Krajíček as Marc-Antoine/Mikuláš
Peter Mikulík as Jean-Pierre/Róbert

Production

According to Robbe-Grillet, his imagination lacked colours and therefore he was disinclined to make films in colour.^[4] All his films prior to Eden and After had been shot in black-and-white. However, after the commercial underperformance of The Man Who Lies (1968), he considered to quit filmmaking because he felt making films in black-and-white was no longer viable in the industry.^[5]^[6]

There was no detailed script for Eden and After.^[7] Robbe-Grillet created a story using the system Austrian-American composer Arnold Schoenberg used in his version of the twelve-tone technique, constructing the film's plot with ten sets of twelve themes arranged in a different order for each set.^[7]^[8] Robbe-Grillet described the result as a mixture of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Marquis de Sade's Justine, with certain components taken from the chivalric romance.^[1] With no written details to rely on, Robbe-Grillet had to discuss each shot and scene at depth with the film's cinematographer Igor Luther [fr; de], which granted Luther considerable creative control over the film.^[2]

Most of the actors Robbe-Grillet hired for the film were obscure since well-established ones in general would not work for a film project that had no proper script.^[7] The hired actors had been informed very little about the film before the production began, only that it was to be shot in Czechoslovakia and Djerba, a Tunisian island.^[7]