The final film of legendary French director Alain Resnais

Post-film Q&A hosted by Mauro Resmini, Lecturer in Italian Studies and Film Studies at the University of Maryland

Adapted from Alan Ayckbourn’s play Relatively Speaking, LIFE OF RILEY is the ebullient and highly stylized story of the emotional entanglements among three couples living in the English countryside. When the couples learn that their close mutual friend George is terminally ill, their shared bonds are laid bare and Resnais’ exquisitely developed characters begin to grapple with their own mortality and romantic vision of life. The brisk and shrewdly articulate encounters between the characters, played by Sabine Azéma, Hippolyte Girardot, Caroline Silhol, Michel Vuillermoz, Sandrine Kiberlain and André Dussollier, unfold an intimate real life story that bleeds in and out of the theater piece in which they are all cast. Splendid scenes of the English countryside and gorgeously illustrated settings demarcate the turning points in the plot, and the continuously blurred line between fiction and reality. A joyously unsettling meditation on the elasticity of the boundaries of love and affection, LIFE OF RILEY is an entirely unique, ingeniously structured and poignantly jubilant farewell from one of the greatest directors of all time.

Mauro Resmini is Lecturer in Italian Studies and Film Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. He received his Ph.D. from Brown University in 2014. He published a book on Steven Spielberg for Il Castoro Cinema Press. Since 2006 he has also been a contributor of Segnocinema, an Italian journal of film criticism, for which he wrote several essays (on digital writing, horror film and Brian De Palma, cinema and the graphic novel) and film reviews.