36 Vues du Pic St. Loup

Jacques Rivette has always been fascinated by performance, so it's appropriate that his latest film — and possibly, though it hurts to think so, his last? — 36 vues du Pic St. Loup, is a gentle, low-key work in which various long-lingering dramas and pains are resolved through performance and play. The film focuses on a small traveling circus, the last vestige of a dying form, setting up in one small town after another, performing in near-empty tents, with a few scattered families sitting stoically watching in the stands. The circus represents a fading grandeur, an old tradition of public performance that now seems outdated. The circus' bright colors are faded with age, its routines are built on old vaudeville-style humor and spectacle, and there's something quaint about it all, as though the whole troupe was composed of time travelers from another era.

The film opens with a silent interlude by the side of the road, where Kate (Jane Birkin) is frustrated by her stalled jeep. A passerby in a flashy convertible, Vittorio (Sergio Castellitto), helps her get the jeep started without saying a word, then drives off, but the pair will meet again in a nearby town, where it turns out that Kate is with the circus, and Vittorio begins following the troupe around on their tour, seeing each of their performances and hanging around them during the day. Over the course of the film, Vittorio remains an enigma, an aimless wanderer who puts the rest of his life on hold to travel with the circus for a few weeks, but Kate similarly begins as an enigma only to have her mysteries gradually revealed throughout the film. Kate had been with the circus — which was founded by her now-deceased father — many years ago, but had left after a tragedy, and only recently returned. Her traumatic past continues to haunt her, even fifteen years later, and though she seems to think that revisiting the circus on what seems to be its final tour would bring her some closure, she's as confused and lost as ever while hovering around the site of her sad past.


Vittorio, who becomes embroiled in the circus' dramas, is fascinated by Kate and takes it upon himself to resolve her issues, to discover the root of what's bothering her and to help her overcome it. As he says dramatically at one point, he wants to "save" her. The film's approach to drama is both low-key and theatrical. The film is circumspect about its melodramatic components, slowly meting out little bits of detail about Kate's past or creating miniature dramas with the other members of the circus. The clown Alexandre (André Marcon) is in love with Barbara (Vimala Pons), the acrobat girlfriend of another cast member, Wilfred (Tintin Orsoni). Kate's niece Clémence (Julie-Marie Parmentier) lightly dodges an admirer, while flirting innocently with Vittorio, letting him pump her for information about Kate. These stories are developed through the most minimal whiffs of suggestion, as Rivette's characteristic probing camera slowly wheels around, coasting in graceful arcs that mirror the curve of the circus' ring, inching in towards closeups as these characters enact their little stories with the same stoical reserve that they apply to their performances. At one point, Alexandre and Wilfred act out a theatrical show of jealousy on an ad-hoc stage that is alternately bathed in light or encased in darkness, while Barbara and Clémence look on. The theatricality of it, the self-conscious presentation of this drama of jealousy, enforces the sense that this is, beneath its serious themes and dark secrets, a very playful film for Rivette, a light film dealing with serious ideas.

Certainly, the recurring sequences of the actual circus performances betray Rivette's interest in play and acting and entertainment, which ultimately trump emotionally exhausting melodrama. Vittorio initially ingratiates himself to the troupe by being the only one to laugh during the circus' opening routine, by the clowns Alexandre and Marlo (Jacques Bonnaffé). The clowns have a bit involving a chair, a stack of dinner plates, and a revolver, and throughout the film Rivette returns to this number again and again, each time revealing more and more of the bit. He obviously appreciates these clowns, who maybe aren't especially funny — indeed, the arena is always silent during their performances with the one exception of Vittorio's loudly appreciative laugh — but who have a certain dignity in enacting this old form of humor, this old form of entertainment, for modern audiences who largely don't show up and don't get it when they do.

Rivette treats the occasional performances by Wilfred similarly. The performer juggles torches or dances in the air, suspended by wires, and by modern standards these are not especially grand or impressive feats. They are small acts, acts that might have seemed extraordinary long ago, but to modern stimulus-overloaded senses, they seem humble. But Rivette still makes them seem, in their small way, magical and graceful, and more than that he makes them seem real. He stresses that these are very physical acts. His precise soundtrack captures not only the woosh of the fire as Wilfred juggles his torches, but the fleshy slap of the torch's handle hitting his hand. When Wilfred is twirling in the air, the grace and beauty of his movements are contrasted against the metallic clinking of the wires, which stretch and clang together with every movement. The sounds root these performances in physicality, in the material, and paradoxically that's what makes them so magical: they are little bursts of creativity and expression emerging from the routine of everyday existence, which is why even the quarrels and jealousies between these performers are enacted theatrically, as performances.


It's appropriate, then, that the film's climax takes place in the ring, with Vittorio taking the place of Marlo as one of the clowns in the opening bit. Here it becomes clear why Rivette spent so much time setting up this act, because Vittorio and Alexandre here divert from the script, improvising awkwardly in response to the shattering of the plates that had previously formed the basis for the whole gag. It's a celebration of improvisation from a director who has always appreciated the power of spontaneous acting, who has always left room for his actors to bring their own ideas and their own ad-libbed words into his films. As a result of the improvisation, the performance becomes both more and less real, constantly shifting between even more over-the-top theatricality than ever and bursts of emotional nakedness that eventually lead Vittorio to, as it were, break the fourth wall of the performance and address the offstage Kate directly. It's funny, and loose, and leads towards Vittorio's delivery of a speech that might as well have come directly from Rivette's mouth.

"This ring is the most dangerous place in the world," he says. "And also the place where everything is possible." As a summation of Rivette's career, and of his view of the cinema and art in general, it would be hard to find a more perfect epigram. The circus, the theater, the cinema: these are venues where it is possible, through play and pretend, to get as close as possible to the real heart of things, to use artifice to explore the deepest emotions. And it is also possible in these creative realms to be totally free, to enact magic, to invent, to delight through outrageous feats and stunning images. Rivette has always thought this way: art is a game, an act of pleasure, and yet it also has the ability to cut deeply, in some ways even more deeply than life itself. This metaphor isn't so metaphorical here — Kate's sad past involves art cutting very deeply, and literally, indeed — but in the end it's through art and performance that these characters can heal the wounds opened, long ago, by art and performance.

This is a modest film of small-scale pleasures, its proportions trimmed to accommodate the fading majesty of the circus. It is, indeed, the shortest proper feature Rivette has ever made, an oddity from a director who has always worked in extended duration. He's still dealing with time here, though, just in a different way. Like many late films by old masters, 36 Vues du Pic St. Loup is about the passage of time, about age, about how events resonate through the years for such a long time after their initial impact. The circus lingers on, an increasingly irrelevant souvenir from another time, just as Kate is haunted by memories of the past. But the circus performers are movingly aware of their own irrelevance, and they soldier on anyway, and it's through this connection to the past that Kate, late in life, is given an opportunity to finally move on and try something new, whatever that may turn out to be. This is Rivette's quiet but heartfelt ode to the things he loves — performance, artifice, the old-fashioned, the irrelevant, the out-of-touch, the quaint. It is a simple film, and a surprisingly direct one from this often circuitous artist, and as such it feels like a rather self-conscious statement of principles from the aging director. When, in one scene towards the end, Vittorio, Alexandre and Clémence take turns approaching the camera head-on, delivering bits of exposition and morals to be taken away from the film, it reinforces the sensation of the director taking an opportunity to speak to an audience that perhaps he feels has been as remote as the sparse, mostly unseen audiences at the circus' performances. It's a touching, affecting film, though more so for what it says about its director and his pet themes than for its intentionally spartan story.

Haut bas fragile

The films of Jacques Rivette often revolve around mysteries and secrets, around conspiracies and secret societies, the past hovering with foreboding over the present, his characters involved in labyrinthine plots that lead to places beyond understanding. Haut bas fragile is no exception, centered as it is on three young women whose lives are seemingly haunted by the past, by the secrets that linger all around them. Louise (Marianne Denicourt) has just awoken from a 5-year coma, and is determined to start a new life while pushing aside everything (boyfriend, family) that occupied her before her prolonged and involuntary absence from the world. Ida (Laurence Côte) was adopted as a child and is obsessed with finding out the identities of her biological parents, hoping that this knowledge will tell her something about her own identity. And Ninon (Nathalie Richard) is fleeing a life of violence that's shown in the opening scenes of the film, when a jealous ex stabs a man who she's dancing with at a club. These women, whose paths cross in ways both major and incidental over the course of the film, are all struggling to determine the courses of their own lives against the inertia of the past, simultaneously seeking the truth about the past and trying to break free of its influence.

This is a common theme in the cinema of Rivette, this concern for the past, a theme that echoes through works like Secret Défense and The History of Marie and Julien, both films where history is a trap, a pattern that dooms the protagonists to cycles of repetition. In Haut bas fragile, however, this trap is continually sidestepped and defused, most notably through music and dance. The film is a musical — or at least, it increasingly becomes one, as the scenes of muscial interruption and performance become more and more frequent over the course of the narrative, transforming what had at times threatened to become a portentous drama into a playful subversion of this drama. Whenever the characters fight or argue, as they often do, their movements become formalized and graceful, striking poses in the midst of the fight, extending their limbs and becoming cat-like in their motion, until the music suddenly erupts and the argument has become a dance, often a dance of flirtation and seduction. It's through the dance, through music and movement, that the characters in the film fall in love and forge friendships, dancing around each other even as Rivette's camera, a playful third partner in these dances, dances around the actors.

This is a charming, exciting film, one in which Rivette lightly prods at some of his typical concerns. He introduces, as he often does, a secret society of sorts, a club that meets in an underground lair to play a sinister game of cards, presided over by the suave and mysterious Alfredo (Wilfred Benaïche). The game is a game of life and death, where one card dictates the killer and another card decides the victim in a real-life game of stalking and murder, a game that recalls Robert Altman's bizarre sci-fi film Quintet. But when Louise — who has infiltrated this mysterious circle through the help of the ubiquitous Roland (André Marcon) — draws the card of the killer, the game turns out to be a farce, a ruse designed to help her overcome her vertigo. The conspiracy dissipates like so much smoke, whereas in so many of Rivette's other films, the conspiracy — and the doubt over whether it exists or not — dominates the action and becomes an obsession for the protagonists. Louise's affliction is probably no coincidence, either, given Rivette's admiration for Hitchcock: whereas Scotty in Vertigo must undergo repeated traumas and psychological torture because of his vertigo, Louise overcomes hers in a few moments through a game. It's a conscious subversion of the thriller's psychosexual dimensions. Again and again, the playfulness of dancing and loving and verbal sparring — like the rhymes of Louise and Ninon's song as they celebrate their newly forming friendship — frees the characters from the constraints of generic drama.


Rather than becoming trapped in cycles of distrust and betrayal, these characters open up new possibilities through the seductiveness and goofiness of dance. The result is a series of happy reversals that send the film careening wildly away from the tragic course that it occasionally seems to be on. Ninon's thievery has short-term bad consequences for one ancillary character, but when she reappears later in the film, she's in a better situation than ever, happier than ever. It's as though Rivette is suggesting that tragedy need not be a permanent condition, and that the story of a life is exactly what we make of it. Thus, though much of the film's narrative is built around a sheaf of papers that provide incriminating evidence about Louise's father, these ultimately turn out to be something of a red herring. The papers threaten to shatter Louise's relationship with her earnest young suitor Lucien (Bruno Todeschini), but instead she doesn't allow the papers' revelations to disturb her; they're part of the past, part of a history that she's moving away from. The real purpose of the papers, in the end, is to provide an excuse for Ninon and Louise to meet, to go off in secret momentarily, and then to emerge, dancing and playful, Ninon twirling around her friend as Louise sways to the music and strikes silly poses as though caught in the flash of a camera. And Rivette's camera, for its part, spins slowly around the women as well, adding its own spiraling inertia to their graceful dance.

This film is a typically slippery and ambiguous delight from Rivette, a mystery whose solution lies, not in the revelation of secrets, but their submersion within an alternate narrative of love, flirtation, and affectionate friendship. It is, as with so many of Rivette's films, a celebration of femininity, where the attempts of the men to control and protect the women, to dictate the direction of the story, prove utterly inconsequential. Ninon and Louise, bonding over a shared distrust of Roland — whose intersections with all three women drive much of the narrative — joke about cooking and eating him, a reversal of the traditional conception of predator and prey. Roland and Lucien attempt to follow, to stalk, to track down these women, but in the process the women turn the tables, rejecting the conspiracies and lies of the men in favor of openness and seduction and the vitality of the dance. These are the positive, exuberant forces at the center of Haut bas fragile, which is packed with Rivette's sly wit and playfully experimental spirit.

William Lubtchansky, 1937-2010

The great cinematographer William Lubtchansky has passed away at the age of 72. He has had a long and fertile career working with Godard, Rivette, Straub/Huillet, Garrel, Varda, Otar Iosseliani, and countless others. In particular, Lubtchansky worked on multiple films for Godard and Rivette, including some of the former's most radical, adventurous work. Lubtchansky was the cinematographer for many of Godard's late 70s forays into video, and for the elegant 1990 masterpiece Nouvelle vague. He collaborated with Rivette over the course of several decades, shooting many of the great director's most enduring works, including almost all the films Rivette has made in recent years.

Below is a small tribute to some of the images left behind by this remarkable cinematographer, all from his work with Godard and Rivette, the two directors most closely associated (in my mind, anyway) with this genius behind the camera. Admire, especially, the muted but somehow eerily beautiful quality of light in these images, which are never flashy or glossy but always striking in more subtle ways.

Numéro deux (Godard, 1975)

Duelle (Rivette, 1976)

Noroît (Rivette, 1976)

Ici et ailleurs (Godard, 1976)

Comment ça va? (Godard, 1978)

Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Godard, 1980)

Le Pont du Nord (Rivette, 1981)

Merry-Go-Round (Rivette, 1981)

Love on the Ground (Rivette, 1984)

Nouvelle vague (Godard, 1990)

La belle noiseuse (Rivette, 1991)

Joan the Maid I: The Battles (Rivette, 1994)

Secret défense (Rivette, 1998)

The History of Marie and Julien (Rivette, 2003)

Don't Touch the Axe (Rivette, 2007)

Joan the Maid II: The Prisons

The second half of Jacques Rivette's epic treatment of Joan of Arc, Joan the Maid II: The Prisons, picks up right where The Battles (reviewed here) left off, following the successful siege of Orléans. But where the first film ended with Joan's (Sandrine Bonnaire) moment of triumph, this second film almost immediately introduces the steps backward, the uncertainties, the political intrigues that would eventually lead to Joan's imprisonment and death. Joan had been fighting for the king, Charles (André Marcon), but Charles is increasingly pulled away from Joan, despite his faith in her, by the more worldly and secular advice of his self-interested council, La Trémoille (Jean-Louis Richard) and Regnault de Chartres (Marcel Bozonnet). Although the film's title would suggest that it is concerned wholly with Joan's trial and imprisonment, it is actually concerned with the manner in which Joan's dominance and confidence were slowly worn away, her spiritual purity betrayed by the political machinations of those more wily and manipulative than she. Despite her victories, the king's advisers immediately begin questioning her, advising the king to make peace, to cease fighting, to work towards a compromise — ideas that are foreign to Joan, secure in the knowledge that she is doing God's will.

From the beginning of the film, Rivette shows how Joan is shaken in her faith by the king's wavering, as he changes course at the whims of his council and hesitates in granting Joan the continued power to fight for him. She is essentially being tempted: to give up her fight, to give up her men's clothes and warrior ways, to rest, finally, after so many months without sleep. It is a powerful temptation, especially since Joan's own unshakable belief in King Charles turns out not to be warranted as the king fails to heed her advice any further after her initial victories pave the way for his official coronation as king of France. Such temptations are at the center of religious belief, and if the first half of Joan's story is the tale of a woman driven by religious devotion to do things seemingly beyond her station or power, the second half recounts this holy woman's struggle to maintain her belief and spiritual convictions against those who were willing to go along with her when it was convenient for them, but want her out of the way when it ceases to serve their worldly ambitions.

There is, certainly, an element of anti-feminine sentiment in Joan's fall. One recurring theme of the film is the distrust of women, especially in religious contexts. When Joan is captured by the enemy duke Philippe (Philippe Morier-Genoud), he tells her that his own religious leaders tell him that all women are monsters and temptresses, that they are not to be trusted. He claims to disagree, but in fact the reason that Joan seems to inspire so much fear — and why she is constantly insulted as being a witch, or a whore, or the Antichrist itself — is because she is a woman who refused to remain in her place, to live the simple life as a country seamstress that seemed to have been destined for her. Even the kindly women in the duke's castle, who wish only to help Joan, advise her to shed her man's clothes, to put on a dress, to let her hair grow long. At best, Joan is seen as resisting the proper place and role for a woman; at worst, her actions are seen as heretical, contrary to the church's emphasis on the behavior appropriate to men and women. The church thus assumes the task of enforcing gender roles as well as mediating spiritual matters. That's why, when Joan is tried, so much of the outrage directed at her seems to be because she is a woman, and that's also why, when she is imprisoned, one of the primary humiliations inflicted upon her is the constant threat of rape and abuse at the hands of her leering guards. She is placed back in her "proper" place, which is to be dressed in woman's clothing again and made an object of sexual desire.


Appropriately enough, this second film is more austere than its predecessor; darker, shadowier, with far fewer of the lovely outdoor vistas that so poetically set the pace in The Battles. Instead, much of the action here takes place indoors, and is enacted with words alone: words of smooth diplomacy, bargaining, backpedaling, betrayal, rather than the forceful clarity of Joan's pronouncements. Despite this, it is not a colder film; at every point, Rivette seems attuned to the human reality of his noble protagonist, to her suffering and indecision and desire to do the right thing even when confronted with those who clearly intend harm for her.

Nor does Rivette entirely abandon the streak of humanistic humor inherent in his treatment of Joan and her milieu. When Joan is with the soldiers, she is portrayed as truly one of them, despite her diminutive stature and a feminine body that no man's clothes can ever truly disguise. She laughs and jokes with them, and smiles with genuine cheer when she tells the men that they will be attacking Paris, that she wants to get close enough to see the city walls for herself. She has a disarming way about her that Bonnaire plays as a kind of innocent, childlike delight in the business of war. Rivette is also in touch, though, with other aspects of Joan's personality, especially with her gentle, quiet spirituality, reflected in the confidence she projects when she believes that she is doing God's will. In one of the film's loveliest, saddest images, Joan genuflects before an altar where she has placed her sword and armor, relinquishing them following the king's decision to agree to a truce. Joan kneels to pray, the flames flickering in the background on the tips of the candles, forming a little halo of fire around her head. It is a gorgeous image, at once spiritually inspiring and melancholy, as Joan acknowledges that her mission is being prematurely brought to an end by circumstances beyond her control.

Rivette's approach to the pomp and grandeur of organized religious ceremony is different; whereas Joan's private spirituality and whispered prayers are genuine and moving, the ritual of the church is absurd and overblown. When Charles is crowned king, in a grand ceremony within a church, each gesture is portentous and slowly drawn out, as the bishops and priests go through their elaborate rites of coronation while the organ and voices provide periodic musical punctuation. Rivette can't help but make a few humorous observations on the fringes of the scene, subtly tweaking these pompous proceedings. As the grandiose choral music soars, Rivette zooms in on the back of the church, where a line of soldiers are just barely holding back a crowd eagerly jostling for position, craning their necks to see the king get crowned, like spectators at a race track trying to get the best view. Rivette mixes the sacred and the common, contrasting the overblown religiosity of the music against the ordinary folk crammed into the church, smiling and agape as they watch this grand spectacle. The punchline comes when, at the end of the ceremony, a church official in his rich garments apologizes to some visitors that this rite wasn't more elaborate; they had to throw it together so quickly.

A darker punchline arrives when Joan's trial becomes a similarly showy affair, marked by more grand speechifying and religious rhetoric. As Joan tells the bishop who first informs her of the trial, if she's already been judged in advance, why go through with the artifice of the show trial? Just skip straight to the punishment, she spits with contempt. But that would be missing the point: to these people the artifice, the show, the ritual, the ceremony, is the essence of religion rather than mere ornamentation. Whereas Joan presents a vision of absolute faith shorn of pretension, the officials of the organized church are beholden to various political factions, possessed of various biases and ideas, enamored of ritual and procedure. Once again, the film's central conflict comes down to the tension between the worldly and the spiritual, although this time even the church itself is revealed as being on the worldly side, too tied up in politics and traditions to consider whether Joan has committed any crime besides being a woman with ideas of her own. Rivette's film, across its two halves, chronicles the tremendous strength of this woman, and her betrayal by a world not yet ready for her feats, for her will, for her daring refusal to adhere to tradition or received authority.

Joan the Maid I: The Battles

Joan the Maid is Jacques Rivette's five-hour, two-part portrayal of the life and death of Joan of Arc, in which Rivette strips away much of the epic legend surrounding this figure and makes her a quieter, more graceful kind of hero. As played by Sandrine Bonnaire, Rivette's Joan is a simple country girl, raised far from the centers of power, unable even to read or write; she says that she would be more content sewing at home with her mother than having to thrust herself into battle in service to God and country. She is a simple girl driven by something mysterious within her, a power and force that emanates from her during every second of Bonnaire's tremendous performance. Bonnaire's Joan is quiet, reserved, and self-assured, at least in public, though in private moments she often struggles with God's will, utterly confident that she has a purpose but not always sure exactly how to go about it. It is no mystery, though, why she motivates people, why she is so eagerly accepted as a savior, as a woman of God: her eyes flash with reserves of inner strength, and her hard peasant's face is a mask of determination.

The first half of Rivette's two-part epic is The Battles, an account of Joan's ascendancy to the right hand of France's king, the dauphin (André Marcon), leading France's army to lift the English siege on Orléans. Despite its secondary title, this film is primarily concerned with battles of words rather than battles between physical armies. Joan must fight every step of the way: to convince the local captain to provide an escort for her to go see the king, to convince the king and his advisers to trust her, to convince a council of holy men that she is inspired by God and not the Devil, to convince the army's leaders to stop delaying and follow her advice. Rivette thus presents a Joan who's very much worldly, prosaic, ordinary in so many ways. She is dressed simply and exists in a very stripped-down, minimal world, captured in Rivette's simple but somehow beautiful images: images that show the real world as it is, without adornment, a physical shell for the hard spirituality of Joan.

She makes grand pronouncements but is constantly confronted with worldly barriers: her army has no supplies, there are delays, when they finally attack they do so without informing her first. She is therefore constantly proved wrong in her predictions about when the English will be routed, when her army will at last be victorious. She cannot help it; she is limited by the men who are with her, by mere flesh and blood, by the need for food and arms. Her spiritual war must be joined to a physical one in order to mean anything of substance. Rivette, too, is every bit as much concerned with physicality. He dedicates numerous scenes to matters of the simple, the routine. These people are concerned with budgets, with provisions: even the king must borrow money from his wealthy backers. In one lengthy scene, a military commander haggles with a town official over the money that the army must borrow to pay for the town's defense; it comes down, ultimately, to bargaining from 300, to 250, to 275. Simple things, small amounts of money, a few coins here and there.

Simple things, too, like sex, like the way two soldiers in Joan's army stop to discuss having their way with her at night, then regret even talking about it later, moved by her angelic countenance and her graceful way of convincing everyone she meets, eventually, that she comes from God. Later, Joan will be subjected, offscreen, to the proddings of women assigned to determine if she's really a virgin or not. She will be tested, her physicality probed and deemed pure, and it's telling that Rivette does not omit such details. He's concerned with the routine, with the sequence of events: how does this myth play out, not as a myth passed down from generation to generation, but as something happening in the moment? How does Joan go from a simple country girl to the leader of an army? By slow progression, by hesitant steps forward and major setbacks and diversions. Along the way, Rivette is constantly stopping to observe what else might be going on, what might be happening at the fringes of a story like this. So while Joan meets with one of her commanders, discussing the budget, Rivette follows another soldier out the door, pursuing a townswoman who he flirts with and kisses and promises to visit later as she giggles and flirts back. Another scene presents an image of Joan not often seen: smiling and cheering as she watches some of the army's pages engaged in a mock battle by a riverside; she joins the male soldiers in cheering on her favorites, a wide grin on her usually somber face for once.


Indeed, though Joan's story is presented with the utmost seriousness and import, Rivette doesn't sacrifice his sly sense of humor to this legend's solemnity. Instead, he fills in the earthy, human details at the fringes of the myth. At one point, Joan is staying with a rural couple who are awed and maybe a little mystified by her holiness and her habit of remaining in unmoving prayer for hours or days at a time. They watch her from the next room as she prays and the wife describes, with hushed reverence, all the signs of Joan's spirituality: her flushed cheeks, her glowing eyes, her otherworldly serenity. But when her husband asks if light is emanating from her, his wife gently chides him to be reasonable: "no, it's just the lamp light." That's the way it is: miracles only go so far, and the rest is up to men, to flesh and blood. Joan's miracles are all small matters, sleights of hand that might easily go unnoticed. She changes the wind direction when the men are complaining that their boats can't bring supplies across the river, and she signifies the miracle by pointedly looking up at her banner, which is suddenly blowing in a favorable direction. Later, her primary "miracle" is to roust an exhausted army into battle by sheer force of will, by the power of her voice and example as she doesn't so much charge towards the English defenses as stumble that way, fumbling with a banner she's trying to take from a resisting footman. It's funny, even, the way a bet between two soldiers leads indirectly to Joan, almost by accident, encouraging the army to take Orléans. The footman, before rushing towards the castle, turns back and asks that his part in all this not be forgotten; he's saying it to his comrade but it might as well be directed at the camera, at Rivette, who obliges by recounting the way two soldiers goofing around helped get Joan into place for her historic moment.

There's a similar sensibility at work in other moments where Rivette lets the seams of history show. His playfulness with this material is given a self-conscious wink in the scene, tossed-off as a bit of peripheral business, where Joan's priest lifts up his robes to show that his feet are well-protected, in response to a passing soldier's mock expression of concern. When even the priest is capable of a goofy joke, Rivette is acknowledging his irreverent perspective, his emphasis on the silly, the profane, the ordinary, over the overtly mystical: it's why even his ghost stories (The History of Marie and Julien) and his magic films (Duelle) are so rooted in the everyday. His crude counterpart here is the gruff, violent soldier La Hire (Stéphane Boucher), a man renowned for his brutality in war. Before battle, he has a special private prayer to God, a plea for God to act towards him as God would like La Hire to act if their positions were reversed; it's a very personal understanding of "do unto others as you would like them to do unto you." La Hire talks to God as though they're just two guys who can maybe come to some sort of mutual understanding, and it's this disarmingly offhand approach to the spiritual and the sacred that informs Rivette's film at nearly every moment.

Even so, there's a sense of grace and beauty in his images that naturally brings the spiritual back into the film. Rivette's landscapes are awe-inspiring in a quiet, unassuming way: foggy, slightly hazy, their colors muted rather than garish, but still somehow sumptuous and beautiful. His images don't call attention to themselves, but are instead gently insistent: the blue midnight aura around Joan as she calls to her allies during a nighttime ride; the castle doors closing into blackness behind the riders as they leave on their mission; the snowy ground with patches of brown showing through; the bare, desolate rooms of sacked castles stripped of their trappings by the English invaders. So many of these images are empty or nearly empty, bathed in silence; Rivette often begins a shot before any characters have entered it, and ends it by panning away to an empty space, lingering there for a few pointed moments, preventing the narrative from ever assuming the forward momentum of the preordained. Instead, every moment is a struggle for Joan; the outcome always seems uncertain. And yet she confronts every setback with her beatific, knowing smile, a look of serenity that suggests the depth of her absolute faith. Rivette's film ends, as it must, with her victory, leaving her further travails for the second half of his epic, The Prisons.

Films I Love #43: La belle noiseuse (Jacques Rivette, 1991)

La belle noiseuse is a late masterpiece from Jacques Rivette, a typically haunting and enigmatic study of the mystery inherent in artistic creation, and the ways in which art and life inform and bleed into one another. The film centers around the aging and increasingly unproductive painter Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli), who is rejuvenated by the appearance at his country estate of a young woman named Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart), who inspires him to begin painting again. The film is sensuous and quiet, slowly exploring the developing relationship between the painter and his muse through lengthy, nearly silent scenes in which Frenhofer poses the nude Marianne into stiff, contorted poses, molding her body, frantically trying to capture her essence. Throughout these scenes, the only sound is often the scratch and scrape of Frenhofer's brushes and pens on paper and canvas, and Rivette frequently points his camera for long stretches of time at the painter's work area, tracing the progress of his art from a blank page to a developed sketch. The film's rhythms are slow and measured, appropriate for a document of the artistic process, the slow carving out of a creative statement from paints and inks on a plain white expanse. Forms and ideas take shape slowly, and the longer Frenhofer paints, both artist and model become more confident, more emotionally invested in the work — Frenhofer finds his passion for painting reawakening, even taking over his life, while Marianne develops from an introspective, nervous model to a passionate, deeply engaged collaborator, sharing in the demands and rigors of Frenhofer's art.

Rivette's deliberate pacing and careful eye lend themselves well to this exploration of creation. His camera circles the protagonists, lingering on Béart's nude form as though it was a statue, staring at Frenhofer's canvases and sketchbooks as the painter's ideas take shape, all of it accompanied by the distinctive scritch-scritch-scritch sounds that, by the end of the film, are subconsciously associated with artistic creation. Although the center of the film, and its heart, is dominated by the lengthy, intense scenes between Frenhofer and Marianne, ancillary characters linger around the edges, affected in various way by the all-encompassing passion of this artistic collaboration. Frenhofer's wife Liz (Jane Birkin) is increasingly driven away, shut out, conscious that Marianne is replacing her as her husband's muse: at the height of his passion for his art, Frenhofer even pulls out a long-abandoned painting of Liz and begins reimagining it, painting over it with images of Marianne, striving to create his masterpiece. Meanwhile, Marianne's immersion in Frenhofer's art causes her to neglect her own lover, Nicolas (David Bursztein), who is left to chat with the disconsolate Liz and his friend Magali (Marie Belluc). Rivette's film not only traces the process of creation and limns its mystery and magic, but examines the effects of such intense creativity on those who surround the artist and inspire his work.

Secret Défense

Throughout his career, Jacques Rivette has always flirted with the thriller genre, evincing a fascination with the shadowy conspiracies and labyrinthine plots that twist and turn behind the scenes, their contours hidden, their surprises held back. In spite of this, Rivette's cinema has been in many other ways the antithesis of the thriller, trading in slow, languid character development and a patient exploration of the truths and lies shared between his characters. He continually adapts the framework of the genre picture — the thriller, the mystery, the detective film — to his own set of concerns and his own unique perspective. In Secret Défense, perhaps for the first time, he confronts the thriller on its own terms, crafting a masterful mystery plot in which, nevertheless, the emphasis is on the longueurs between actions rather than on the twists and turns of the plot.

The story is certainly an archetypal revenge scenario. Sylvie (Sandrine Bonnaire), a research scientist, learns from her brother Paul (Grégoire Colin) that their father, who had died five years before in a train accident, had not fallen off the train but had in fact been pushed. Paul suspects their father's business partner Walser (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), who now runs the business in his place. Sylvie is not so sure, but she fears that her brother will rashly and foolishly try to kill him, so to cut him off she goes to kill Walser herself instead. This triggers a convoluted sequence of events in which Sylvie is placed in the same situation as her hated nemesis, coming to understand Walser and why he did what he did. The film doesn't lack for drama, but that's not what primarily interests Rivette. The most crucial narrative scenes have a kind of blunt, clipped quality, as though Rivette is only fulfilling an obligation by showing us these things. Violence happens quickly and abruptly, with a faint undertone of surrealist absurdity, and also a touch of Rivette's theatricality: these are stage deaths, the gestures just slightly exaggerated and stylized.

Rivette intersperses the dramatic scenes, the confrontations and revelations and twists, with extended sequences that expose the mechanics by which the characters get around, communicate with one another, navigate their world and their story. The scenes that would be brief and obligatory in another film, Rivette expands and elevates to a central importance. The simple act of moving from one place to another is never glossed over, but is instead transformed into an epic narrative in itself. At one crucial moment, after she has decided to kill Walser, Sylvie must take a long journey from Paris to the countryside, where Walser is spending the night at his palatial home. Another film would cut from Sylvie's decisive action of packing for the trip directly to her standing in the dark outside his home, stalking him. Instead, Rivette follows her in near-silence as she buys her train ticket, switches from train to train, nervously fidgets, tries on different pairs of sunglasses as though fancying herself a character in a gangster movie. He follows her long walk through the dark dirt roads leading from the train station to Walser's house, as she hides her face from passing cars and strides purposefully towards her fatal destination. Rivette lingers with her, refusing to resort to an easy linkage between decision and action: he emphasizes the time she has to think, to ponder what she's going to do, to wonder what it's going to be like when she finally gets there. And then, when the moment finally comes after all this anticipation, nothing goes as planned, and it's over in a startling few seconds, a brilliant climax/anticlimax before Rivette fades to black.

Rivette is fascinated with the long pauses between actions, the moments of stasis where Sylvie is simply lounging around her apartment — with Mark Rothko prints propped up casually against the walls — or working at her lab or traveling by train. At times, Rivette seems intent on remaking, again and again, the Lumière brothers' L'arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat, and imagining its sequels and prequels: woman waiting for train, woman traveling on train, woman switching trains. And yet Rivette's film is irrevocably set in an era when such things no longer hold the fascination they did for audiences in earlier times. Travel like this is mundane, ordinary, and Rivette's lengthy shots of trains pulling in and out of stations capture this prosaic quality without obscuring the strange beauty the Lumières must have seen in such images.


The train is no longer the height of technology, and Rivette continually reminds us of this by packing the film with then-modern accoutrements: cordless phones, answering machines, fax machines, computers, the scientific equipment that Sylvie uses in her lab, and the mysterious weapons systems being manufactured by Walser's company. These technological devices drive the plot, but often in negative ways: the phone bears only bad news, and more often than not the answering machine's assurances that someone will "call back" are never fulfilled. Communication is difficult, missed opportunities are frequent, and thus everybody seems to be out of sync with everyone else, misunderstanding one another's motives and actions and words. All of this technology is amassed around these characters to facilitate things, to make travel and communication easier, but they are nevertheless unable to make connections or speak openly to one another, to get beyond the lies and silences. This is why the truth comes out only slowly, hesitantly, after false starts and misleading diversions. It's Rivette's take on the necessity for deceit and double talk in the thriller genre: the characters lie because they simply don't know how to talk to one another. This is also why, perhaps, Sylvie keeps dodging her earnest, likable boyfriend Jules (Mark Saporta), unable to say anything to him. Later, she'll manage to tell a friend the truth only by backing into it, telling it first as though it was part of a dream.

Rivette's characters are so often weighted down by their histories, haunted by the past — sometimes literally, as in the romantic ghost story History of Marie and Julien. Here, Sylvie is haunted by the long-ago death of her older sister Elizabeth, a suicide she never understood, a death that lingers with her just as Paul can't get over their father's death. This obsession with missing relatives extends outside of Sylvie and Paul's family with the entry of the waifish Ludivine (Laure Marsac), who's searching for her missing sister Véronique (also played, earlier in the film, by Marsac, in a chameleonic double role: the pale, severe Ludivine and the lively Véronique couldn't be more different). Rivette has always been fascinated by doubles and mirroring, a theme that was especially apparent in the Duelle/Noroît diptych of 1976. Here, multiple characters enact the same plot, as though trapped within an endless cycle, unconsciously repeating the same narratives: investigation, mistaken assumptions, murder. Murderer and victim switch places and identities fluidly, standing in for one another and for others — some kill so that others don't have to, some die so that others won't have to. It is a cycle of sacrifice, a cycle in which the deeds of the past reverberate in unexpected ways in the present.

This has often been a key theme for Rivette, for whom revenge and violence hold a peculiar fascination — for a director renowned for his slow, stately pacing, his films seethe with strong emotions just below the surface. This one is no exception despite its stony, tranquil surface. Rivette gets understated performances from his cast, who don't react with melodramatic verve to the sometimes startling turns of the plot. If the narrative edges into soap opera in its final act, it's barely noticeable because the characters take it all in stride, with little to betray their tangled inner states. Bonnaire especially is perfectly balanced, capturing Sylvie's increasingly frazzled nerves and disintegrating composure while hardly ever venturing outside of a very narrow range of calm, non-committal expressions. Rivette's camera often lingers over the actress' face, so distinctive and angular, staring into her eyes or tracing her geometric profile for long moments of quiet contemplation.

Besides the oblique references to Rivette's past in terms of theme, this film seems like something of a summation for the director, a conscious engagement with the past. Just as the past and its horrors haunt these characters, the film itself is populated by ghosts from Rivette's cinematic history: his one-time youthful heroine Hermine Karagheuz (of Duelle and Merry-Go-Round) has a cameo as a stern, sour nurse; Sylvie's mother Geneviève is played by Out 1's François Fabian; Bernadette Giraud, who played a young aspiring actress in Gang of Four, reappears here as a maid. Rivette has often used the same actors multiple times, but here the way he inserts these characters around the fringes of the narrative seems calculated to call attention to the device, to add a metafictional layer to the casting. The appearance of these characters, particularly the instantly recognizable Karagheuz, is a way of tying this film to its director's lineage: this isn't just a thriller but a Rivette thriller. And that means it's a particularly smart, contemplative and entrancing thriller.