Duelle (1976, Jacques Rivette)
Stars Juliet Berto (Frederique in Out 1) and Bulle Ogier (Pauline in Out 1) as two mysterious women, Hermine Karagheuz (Marie in Out 1) as a somewhat less mysterious woman and Jean Babilée (a dancer not in a lot of films) as her brother Pierrot, and also Claire Nadeau and Nicole Garcia (Mon oncle d’Amérique, now a director).
Frederique fatale with the awesome Babilée:
I don’t really know what exactly happened in this one. I am willing to watch it again sometime to find out.
Music is improv piano and the pianist is on set, in the shot, even in places where he obviously does not belong. Acting and plot are perversely mysterious. After a bit I started pretending that this was a sequel to Out 1 and that Frederique, Pauline and Marie were the same characters from that film. I found that it didn’t make any more or less sense.
Bulle Ogier, after the world turns blue, In-the-Mouth-of-Madness-style:
There is a very powerful jewel which the two goddesses would like to possess in order to become human. Either the jewel or the goddesses tend to bring death upon people who mess with this jewel. Marie gets her hands on it and uses a Story of Marie and Julien-style spell to banish the two and return the world to normal.
David Ehrenstein has the inside scoop on literary references: “Our innocent heroine (Hermine Karaghuez instantly recalling Betty Schneider in Paris nous appartient) recites lines from Cocteau’s play [Knights of the Round Table] as a kind of incantation, much as Geraldine Chaplin reads lines from Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy in Noroit.” Rivette screened The Seventh Victim for the cast, and D.E. also mentions Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne as an influence.
Our heroine Marie:
A story from when Jonathan Rosenbaum visited the set:
“The next shot occurs on an even bleaker adjacent street with decrepit turn-of-the century houses and peeling paint, Viva and Lucie approaching from some distance again. But this time something extra-ordinary happens: a portly middle-aged woman with hair the color of ashes and sawdust, unaware of the presence of actors and crew, wanders down the street after the take begins and stoops over to peep through a mail slot in a tin fence — a Lumiere subject suddenly come to life. She steps back a bit, looks around: will she notice the camera on one side, the approaching actresses on the other? Rivette can barely contain himself; everyone holds his breath. She looks through the slot again, and just as she passes, Karagheuz has the ingenious idea of incorporating her as a prop, a temporary shield to hide behind… Lubtchansky declares it a successful take; certainly it’s an unrepeatable one. The woman wanders off, still oblivious to the movie she’s stumbled into, and I step over to the mail slot to see what she was peering at. The answer: nothing at all.”
I forget who this is, but she’ll be dead in a minute:
David Cairns put it best:
“Lots of creaking in this film! As the dolly trundles over wooden floors, a cacophony of straining wood announces its presence. Since the film has a very live soundtrack, there was obviously no way to eliminate these extraneous sounds, so they kind of make a mild virtue of them. The camera movements, couples with the moves of the actors, are extremely elegant and elaborate, and the symphony of sounds that accompany them all can be seen as atmosphere.”
Awesome costumes all round. The romance of 1976, with added ‘thirties vibe, plus MASSIVE sunglasses; veils; many hats; a silver-tipped cane and a magic gemstone activated by drops of blood…
Jean Babilée is an amazing physical presence, not just when he does his acrobatic feats, but just in his general movements, which are all like dance, even when maybe he’s just moving around so you can’t see how short he is next to the women.”
Rivette himself, before shooting on the four films began:
Tags: bulle ogier, Jacques RivetteFirst, starting from the basic principle of each of the fictions, the building of not so much a traditional scenario as a canvas: a construction, a framework of some fifteen block-sequences. Evolving parallel in time, the four stories are all divided into three main sections, three acts, corresponding to the three lunar phases (from new moon to full, return of the new moon, then finally full moon again — therefore with the same number of transitions from darkness to light) which circumscribe the forty days of Carnival.
Then, during shooting, each “unit” (each block-sequence) will be subjected to a method designed to break down not only conventional dramatic techniques but also the more recent conventions of improvisation with all the prolixities and cliches it entails (hesitations, provocations, etc.), and to establish an ecriture based on actions, movements, attitudes, the actor’s ‘gestural’, in other words. The ambition of these films is to discover a new approach to acting in the cinema, where speech, reduced to essential phrases, to precise formulas, would playa role of ‘poetic’ punctuation. Not a return to the silent cinema, neither pantomime nor choreography: something else, where the movement of bodies, their counterpoint, their inscription within the screen space, would be the basis of the mise en scene.
In order to enable us to make a definitive crossing of this frontier which separates traditional acting from the kind we are looking for: the constant presence during shooting of musicians (different instruments and styles of music according to each film) who would improvise during the filming of sequences, their improvisation dependent on the actors’ playing, the latter also being modified by the musicians’ own inventions (recorded in direct sound along with the dialogue and the “stage noises” properly speaking).