Providence (1977) on Netflix
Clive Langham, an ailing, alcoholic writer, lies awake through the night before his 78th birthday. He drafts a novel and casts his own family in it: Claude, Sonia, Kevin.
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- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.4/103,776 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes73%
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Plot summary
Clive Langham is an ailing, alcoholic writer who cannot sleep on the night before he turns 78. He lies in bed building and rebuilding scenes for a novel, populating it with figures taken from his own family and shaped by his fantasies and his memories, while he comments sourly on the way they behave. His son Claude turns up in the pages as a cold prosecuting lawyer who enjoys cruel exchanges. Kevin, Clive's illegitimate son, is imagined as an idealistic soldier accused of mercy-killing an old man who was being hunted. Sonia, Claude's wife, sympathizes with Kevin in the face of her husband's hardness. Clive invents Helen as Claude's mistress but gives her the features of his dead wife Molly.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Providence (1977)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Alain Resnais had a longstanding ambition to cast John Gielgud in a substantial film role after seeing him perform on stage, and it was Dirk Bogarde who encouraged him to approach the actor.
- The producer Klaus Hellwig suggested Alain Resnais make a film with the British playwright David Mercer; the two men did not speak each other's language fluently, so their discussions of drafts and redraftings ran over a year, and Mercer's original idea of political prisoners held in a sports stadium gave way to an ageing writer seeking the material for a novel.
- For a deliberately theatrical backdrop, one setting shows a seascape in which artificial waves surge up among the painted rocks; the effect was achieved by blowing bursts of polystyrene foam pieces from beneath the set.
- In the scenes Clive Langham imagines, the layout of a set changes from one shot to the next: a door in the corner of a room appears at the bottom of a flight of stairs, and a conversation between four characters continues in the middle of a party.
- Exterior scenes were shot in Providence and Albany in the US and in Brussels, Antwerp and Louvain, then used together to form a single composite cityscape for the background of certain scenes.
- Providence was the first film Alain Resnais made in English, and he assembled a prestigious cast of British and American actors despite the restrictions on the budget.
