I have a hard time accepting what I feel is the resigned subtlety of Alain Resnais’ current style. This, it must be said, comes from an ignorance of the director’s entire filmography from 1966’s The War Is Over up through 1997’s Same Old Song. But with his most recent film Coeurs (“Hearts”, but the English title of Alan Ayckbourn’s play upon which it is based is Private Fears in Public Places), like his previous film, the musical Not on the Lips (2003), is taken from the world of the stage and its theatricality is, if anything, emphasized and highlighted by the director. It is technique I have a hard time settling into, especially when recalling the invigorating, often dissonant cinema of Resnais’ early films. In the case of Coeurs, the film takes several male-female pairs of Parisians, all past their thirties and all frustrated, vaguely or intensely, with their current state of lives, and runs them into and around one another in enclosed, confined spaces. These spaces—several apartments, a reality office, and a bar—are all beautiful but anonymous, and exceedingly stylized in gauzy bright colors. Pains are taken to subdivide the sets and compositions visually, either with actual spatial interference like bead curtains or glass interior windows, or compositionally using varied vertical patterns that are flattened into layers of segmentation in the frame. Resnais moves from one collection of characters to another by transitioning with dissolves of snow falling, and with the entire story taking place during an endlessly snow Parisian winter, Coeurs has an insulated, glowing, and artificial appearance. Characters attempt to bring one another together through various activities—shopping for apartments, exchanging videotapes, talking at a bar, dating-by-advertisements—but the activities, like many of the conversations, seem one-sided and emphasize not necessarily disconnection, but rather a sorrowful misguidance, as if steps taken long ago subtly resulted in this, which, when one comes to think of it, is not where one imagined oneself. The evocation Resnais and his adapter Jean-Michel Ribes conjure up in the film, one of sustained melancholy and faint, dim struggles out of long, slow declines, is particularly memorable. But it comes at the cost of an awkward source, a play whose obvious and convenient allusions, such as the fact that every character seems to have a regretful past, seem overly simplistic, and much of the action of the play itself, most especially in the Christian care-taker character who has an erotically contradictory attitude towards her faith, come off as ridiculous and forced. There is a vague connection between the snow on the television screen in relation to partially-erased VHS tapes that connects with the snow-globe segues between scenes, something about pasts or parts of one’s character that remains visible and flawed even while one changes or moves on (relating also the private/public dichotomy of the film’s English title as well as Renais long-running interest in time and memory expressed cinematically), but Resnais’ formalism has retreated to masterful but all-too-subtle cinematic explorations of stage material. The film’s opening scene, and perhaps its best directorially, moves from a foggy, Psycho-like swooping camera moving over Paris as it comes to rest at an apartment window, and proceeds to film the scene in the empty apartment through Cinemascope close-ups, tight camera movements, somewhat-abstracted background space, precise framing, and an otherwise interested, but never incisive formalism. The effect is of general dulling of a sharpness to the work, missing an edge that truly unites the obvious theatre roots of the source to the cinematic adaptation of its oft sublime sadness, as the uniformly stellar cast continually outperform the fairly mediocre play.