Dissecting an Alain Resnais film is an undertaking closer to the vivisection of a complex organism than to the criticism of a narrative work. And in no other of his films is this comparison so apt, so nearly literal, as in "My American Uncle". Here, the director of fragmented memory and the mental architectures of Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad abandons the infinite corridors of pure subjectivity to erect an open-air laboratory, a human terrarium where the guinea pigs are not white rodents, but three specimens of French Homo sapiens on the cusp of the 1980s. The result is a disorienting work, a filmic essay that uses fiction as a microscope slide, a treatise on human ethology disguised as a bittersweet comedy.

The structure is a daring and dizzying intellectual collage. Three parallel stories, destined to intersect in a cruel ballet of ambitions and frustrations. There is René (an earthy and vulnerable Gérard Depardieu), from a humble peasant background, who climbs the ladder of a textile factory only to find himself on the edge of a managerial precipice. There is Janine (an icy and feverish Nicole Garcia), the daughter of communist militants, who repudiates her ideological upbringing to pursue success in the world of entertainment and fashion. And there is Jean (a superb and restrained Roger Pierre), scion of the educated bourgeoisie, whose political and media career is a constant exercise in power and an escape from his own emotional responsibilities. Three destinies, three trajectories of social ascent and existential crisis that, in a conventional film, would have formed the core of the drama. But Resnais is no conventional director.

Serving as both the keystone and the epistemological lockpick for the entire construction is the figure of the biologist and philosopher Henri Laborit, who appears in the film as himself, a demiurge in a white coat who comments on, explains, and frames the characters' actions through his theories on behavior. The triune brain (reptilian, limbic, neocortical), the reactions to stress (fight, flight, inhibition of action), and the struggle for dominance are not mere marginalia: they are the film's operating system. Resnais, in a stroke of directorial genius, constantly intersperses the human stories with footage of experiments on rats. A manager humiliated by his superior? Cut to a rat that receives an electric shock after finding its food blocked by a partition. A woman trapped in a dead-end relationship? Here is a rat that, unable to flee or fight, develops ulcers and psychosomatic ailments.

This parallel, which in other hands could feel didactic or brutally reductionist, becomes a powerful short-circuit in Resnais's grasp. It forces us to question our own humanism, the romantic notion of free will, the narrative we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives. What, then, is man, Resnais seems to ask, if not a super-organism at the mercy of biochemical impulses, masked as free choices and justified in hindsight by our cerebral cortex? The examination is cold, almost clinical, yet the film is never without a subterranean empathy for these creatures trapped in the invisible cages of their existence. It is a work that possesses the scientific rigor of a BBC documentary and the existential despair of a Michel Houellebecq novel, written thirty years ahead of its time.

But Resnais's hall of mirrors doesn't stop at biological determinism. With a meta-textual layering that anticipates the postmodern obsessions of a Charlie Kaufman, the director adds another level of conditioning: the cultural, and more specifically, the cinematic. Each character acts not only according to their primal instincts, but also by modeling their behavior on iconic archetypes of French cinema. Thus, in moments of crisis or decision, Jean channels the virile and patriarchal solidity of Jean Gabin; Janine evokes the tormented and fatal elegance of Danielle Darrieux; and René dreams of the adventurous and romantic heroism of Jean Marais. Our "American uncle," the mythical figure of the title who promises success and a way out, is nothing more than a ghost, a cultural construct, a fable. The real cage, perhaps the most powerful one, is the cinema inside our heads, the repertoire of images and narratives that informs our desires and our reactions. We are rats in a maze, yes, but a maze whose walls are wallpapered with the posters of our favorite films.

This approach places "My American Uncle" in a unique position in the cinematic landscape. On the one hand, it is the direct heir to the "film-essay" of Jean-Luc Godard, with its taste for deconstruction, quotation, and the direct address. On the other, it represents a kind of inversion of it. If Godard uses the essay to do politics, Resnais uses it to do science, or rather, to explore the biological foundations upon which all political and social superstructures rest. Furthermore, the work engages in a long-distance dialogue with the literary naturalism of an Émile Zola, whose Rougon-Macquart cycle was, in its own way, a gigantic experiment to "study the flaws of heredity and the influence of environment." René, Depardieu's textile manager, is a character who would not have been out of place in Germinal or L'Assommoir, a man crushed by forces—economic and biological—larger than himself.

Resnais's direction is surgically precise. The editing, handled as always by his faithful collaborator Albert Jurgenson, is not merely narrative, but associative and argumentative. Every cut is a thesis, every juxtaposition an hypothesis. Sacha Vierny's cinematography, cold and functional, avoids any aesthetic indulgence, serving the clarity of the discourse. And yet, the film is not a frigid intellectual exercise. The performances of the actors, left free to infuse warmth and neurosis into their "case studies," create a constant tension between the abstraction of the theory and the concreteness of the human drama. The suffering of René, the frustration of Janine, the hypocrisy of Jean are palpable, real, and it is precisely for this reason that their juxtaposition with the lab rats is so profoundly unsettling and fertile.

Viewed today, "My American Uncle" seems prophetic. In an age dominated by neuroscience, behavioral marketing, and debates on the boundary between nature and culture, Resnais's film has not lost an ounce of its relevance. Indeed, its formal audacity and the radicalism of its thought resonate with even greater force. It is a work that challenges the viewer, forcing them to renegotiate their perception of themselves and of cinema itself. It offers no easy answers or consolations. Laborit, in the end, tells us that while man is the only creature capable of understanding the mechanisms that govern him, he rarely uses this knowledge to change. We continue to fight for dominance, to flee, to inhibit ourselves, trapped in a repetition compulsion that has roots as ancient as our reptilian brain. It is a ruthless and brilliant masterpiece, an unidentified cinematic object that continues to question, provoke, and illuminate, proving that cinema can sometimes be the sharpest tool for dissecting the soul. Or, perhaps, just the brain.