Brandon's movie memory

“No more plundering until further notice”

I wish I knew how this movie’s title was pronounced, because every time I think of it, Fred Schneider sings “here comes a narwhal!” in my head. It’s gonna be “narr-WHAA” until some Frenchman tells me otherwise. One site translates it as “Nor’wester.”

Morag’s brother is killed, she seeks revenge on pirate queen Giulia, infiltrates the castle with help of traitorous Erika. Gradually all of Giulia’s associates are killed off, then G & M stab each other to death, the end.

Giulia (left) and Morag having stabbed each other to death:

So on that level, I “understand” the movie… but I wouldn’t say I understand the movie. At least at the end of Duelle, when Marie banishes Frederique and Pauline (or whatever their names were) I had a sense that the story Meant Something. But comprehension aside, the playfulness and spontaneity and magic were enough to make it a pretty great movie. Plus there’s that something that Rivette does that makes his scenes fascinating to me and makes me want to watch all his films… whatever that thing is, this movie had plenty of it.

Morag and Erika have meetings in which they sit or walk robotically and recite lines in English from the play The Revengers Tragedy. So maybe reading that would help somewhat. Then again, D. Ehrenstein says “Analysis begins to run into a series of dead ends. The texts utilized as central sources of quotation… Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy in Noroit — are merely pre-texts, having nothing to “say” about the films that enclose them, posed in the narrative as subjects for further research.”

As in Duelle, whenever there’s music in a scene the musicians are part of that scene, even when they realistically would’ve left the room. Maybe right before the shot begins Giulia has threatened their lives and told them to play, no matter what. They seem to be watching the action, but not enthusiastically.

There are long, long times with no spoken dialogue. Lighting is can be dim indoors, mostly looks natural. It was Rivette’s first film shot by William Lubtchansky, who would shoot most of the rest of his career films (not Wuthering Heights). He is husband to Nicole L., who has edited everything since 1969 (incl. Out 1).

The magic is toned way down from Duelle. Morag seems to have no powers, is just a kickass fighter (the very few times she fights, or moves quickly, or changes expression). Giulia can electrocute people with her jewelry, and causes one of the treasure-greedy male fighters to explode towards the end. There is a play-with-the-play performance where the girls happily re-enact their murder of the blonde woman whose name I didn’t catch, because it wouldn’t be Rivette without some kind of meta-performance aspect. There are gas lamps and castles and swordfights and magic, all very period, but then there is lots of cool, modern (clearly 70′s) clothing and guns and motorboats.

The men of the castle:

Our lead, Morag with the murdered brother who seeks revenge, is Geraldine Chaplin, then of Cría cuervos, The Three Musketeers and Nashville, later of Love on the Ground, a couple by Resnais, and Talk To Her.

Giulia, leader of the pirates, is Bernadette Lafont, Sarah in Out 1, also in Le Beau Serge, A Gorgeous Bird Like Me, The Mother and the Whore and Geneologies of a Crime.

The traitorous Erika is Kika Markham of Truffaut’s Two English Girls and Dennis Potter’s Blade on the Feather.

Morag contemplates stabbing Giulia early on:

There’s a long piece of writing on Noroit by Mary Wiles called Sounding Out The Operatic, but of course I can’t find it.

Rivette: “When I was filming Noroît, I was persuaded that we were making a huge commercial success, that it was an adventure film that would have great appeal … When the film didn’t come out, when it was considered un-showable … I was surprised. I don’t consider myself … unfortunately, I’m not very lucid when it comes to the potential success of my projects.”

Ehrenstein points out interesting things about Noroît and Duelle: the conflicting acting approaches (Chaplin is stylized, Lafont is flip and cool), the strong position of women in the narrative, and that the setting of the castle by the sea “suggests the possibility of an atmosphere the mise en scene never seems directly to create.”

J. Reichert: “As with all good revenge dramas (this one inspired by bloody Jacobean plays), the mass of killings begin to far outweigh the initial wrong done and the angel of vengeance experiences moments of doubts and sympathy for her marks—there’s betrayal as well. Rivette shorthands these narratively rich moments, suggesting them in a glance, a line, a change of Chaplin’s face, so that he can maintain focus on the ballet-like movement of his players through space, where stowing recently acquired treasure takes on the aspect of slow-motion acrobatics. The drama climaxes in a clifftop masquerade ball/murder spree/dance performance shot across what looks like infrared, B&W, and color, that combines violence and poetry into a mix that’s literally unlike anything I’ve seen.”

cover shot:

A giddy Morag laughs in the face of the dying blonde woman:

Erika (?) performs for the crew:

Death comes too soon for Giulia:

dance party:

Netflix says: “Art and life intertwine when four aspiring actresses study with a renowned film instructor in this acclaimed psychological drama directed by Jacques Rivette. Assigned to analyze the play Double Infidelities, the women – who also happen to be roommates – soon find themselves caught up in a web of suspense and scandal as the script spills over into their offstage lives.”

Only my seventh Jacques Rivette film, but here I am watching it going “oh that’s SO Rivette” as if I’m some expert or even someone who knows how to pay attention properly while watching a movie. Half (?) of this one takes place in Bulle Ogier’s theater, where the girls are practicing a play we never see performed, and I’m all “ooh, that’s just like in Out 1 and Paris Nous Appartient” but I’m not really paying attention to the text of the play, so whether the Netflix blurb is accurate I cannot say. Then we’ve got a secret conspiracy, the train rides from Secret Defense (done very differently here, brief and abstract, much better), a direct reference to La Belle Noiseuse, and Bulle Ogier and you’ve got Rivette 101.

The careful compositions and slow unveiling of story and character flow like a Rivette film, but otherwise I can’t say it was similar to his others that I’ve seen… the experience of watching them was very different. I guess it’d be the most like Secret Defense, if I had to compare.

Above: JR muse Bulle Ogier as a great actress turned acting instructor.

The titular four are Joyce, Anna, Claude and new roommate Lucia, who is replacing ex-roomie Cécile, who has started acting strange and disappearing a lot, caught up in her boyfriend’s criminal trial. In a mystical storm scene, Lucia finds some keys that Cécile has hidden in the apt., keys which could clear the boyfriend’s name while taking down someone powerful. Thomas is out to stop this at all costs, following each of the girls (mostly non-threateningly) and asking them questions, finally getting sometime-lesbian Claude to fall in love with him, gaining him access to the house so he can search for the keys. Cécile has also come back looking for the keys, and even Constance (Bulle Ogier) gets involved, getting arrested at the end for hiding Cécile’s boy after he escaped prison.

Some occasional Celine-and-Julie antics (see mock trial above). What movie has most in common with Out 1 is its split between the easily-summarized plot (above) and the theater scenes which add to the character of the movie but since I didn’t understand those scenes’ connection to the rest of the story, don’t come out much in my discussion.

Irene Jacob of “Red” and “Double Life of Veronique” had a small part, as one of the actors I think.

Above: the Four, left to right:
Lucia – Inês de Medeiros – in movies by João César Monteiro and Pedro Costa
Joyce – Bernadette Giraud – later in Secret Defense and Joan of Arc 1
Claude – Laurence Côte – in Up Down Fragile, Thieves and Godard’s Nouvelle Vague
Anna – Fejria Deliba – in an Olivier Assayas movie

And:
Cécile – Nathalie Richard – Up Down Fragile, 2 by Assayas, 2 by Haneke
“Thomas” – Benoît Régent – lead dude in “Blue”, died a month after “Red” opened
Constance – Bulle Ogier – of “Out 1″ and everything else

Thankfully, I have a downloaded copy of the movie from Raitre Italian TV, so I can get lots of screen shots.

The charactors (actors) and their relationships seem more important than plot/storyline, so I’ve made a page for the characters first, then a story summary page, separated into day one and day two, totalling my most complex journal entry to date!

I spent all this time on plot and character description, not necessarily because the story elements are so important, but because I may not get to see this again and I want to be able to remember it.

But what of the movie, overall? Worth the trip to New York to see it, for sure. A total experience of a film, from the dedicated audience to the live subtitles to the 16mm presentation to the museum theater that hosted it to the sheer length and intermissions to the Jean-Michel Frodon (Cahiers du Cinema editor) introduction to the content, with its very long wide shots and very gradually developing story… many scenes that only form a complete big-picure scenario if you’re paying close attention for most of its runtime.

Dennis Lim of the NY Times called it “the cinephile’s holy grail” and says: “In the annals of monumental cinema there are few objects more sacred than Mr. Rivette’s 12 1/2-hour OUT 1. Shot in the spring of 1970, this fabled colossus owes its stature not just to its immodest duration but also to its rarity. Commissioned and then rejected by French television, the film had its premiere on Sept. 9 and 10, 1971, at the Maison de la Culture in Le Havre before receding into obscurity . . . has become a true phantom film whose reputation rests on its unattainability . . . Mr. Rivette worked without a script, relying instead on a diagram that mapped the junctures at which members of his large ensemble cast would intersect. The actors came up with their dialogue; the only thing Mr. Rivette actually wrote were the enigmatic notes Mr. Léaud’s character receives . . . With OUT 1 he found the perfect match of form and content, an outsize canvas for a narrative too vast to apprehend. In a 1973 interview Mr. Rivette described the film’s creep from quasi-documentary to drama in ominous terms: the fiction ‘swallows everything up and finally auto-destructs’”.

Having thought about the movie heavily for a week I’m gonna have to say I loved it. Not just a legendary museum curiosity that people pretend to like to impress other cinephiles, but actually a super amazing film worthy of its reputation. Of course, mostly its reputation is that of an unattainable film (we were told this was the eight-ever public screening), not of a great masterwork… but I guess it’s worthy of both of those. I’m sure I’d see it again, if not anytime soon.

The experimental theater exercises get very long, even too long, but not tedious. If a scene last “too long” in a regular movie, maybe you could’ve trimmed two minutes to make it feel right. But the theater scenes aren’t necessary at all, from a story point of view, so there’s no telling how long they need to be. When it hits me that I’ve been watching the same theater scene for twenty minutes, it’s not annoyance but awe that hits me. It’s hard to say what exactly is necessary in this movie… once you start cutting or shortening scenes, tying up loose ends and clarifying character connections and histories, you’re talking about a different movie (and not SPECTRE, but a different movie entirely). Best leave it the unwieldy beast it is, and appreciate it as that.

Dennis Lim’s article is a good one… here’s more:
“Out 1″ now seems a relic of a bohemian heyday, a time when you could spend your days rehearsing ancient Greek plays or making 12-hour films. But even in 1970 that hazy idyll was already fading. The film takes its shape, as Mr. Rosenbaum has noted, from “the successive building and shattering of utopian dreams.” An epic meditation on the relationship between the individual and the collective, “Out 1″ devotes its second half to fracture and dissolution. But it’s not a depressing film, perhaps because its implicit pessimism is refuted by its very existence. Experiential in the extreme, “Out 1″ cannot help transforming the solitary act of moviegoing into a communal one.

And Lim says that Rivette’s 2007 movie Don’t Touch The Axe will be revisiting Balzac’s “History of the Thirteen”. “Does this represent a closing of the circle? An expansion of the master plan? If there’s one thing we know from Mr. Rivette’s films, it’s that the big picture will remain just outside our grasp.”

Reverse Shot says: “In Rivette there’s a sense, not just of watching or duration, both of which are passive ideas, but of actively being put through a process”.

Crawford in Reverse Shot: “Out 1 was made in the aftermath of the social uprising of May ’68, when a series of strikes by Parisian student unions devolved into a full-bore confrontation with the military. What once began as a hope to radically reinvent the mores of a stagnant and conservative society ended meekly, with the unions urging a peaceable return to work and De Gaulle’s party consolidating its power to a greater degree than ever. Out 1 taps into this post-May ’68 malaise, betraying an abiding mistrust in grand social movements, services organizations. Paris is turned into a disconnected amalgam of individual groups hermetically sealed off from one another.”

“Is it too simplistic to describe Colin as a spectator’s surrogate and leave it at that? What do we make of choice to pose as a deaf-mute and his return to that state at the end of the film? How, for that matter, do we take of the weird behavior of the male (Colin) and female (Frédérique) interlopers? Their logic and mode of behavior is vastly different from anyone else in the film; it’s like they’ve parachuted in from Céline and Julie Go Boating.”

Ah ha: Rivette’s interview from Film Comment… he says shots of Paris’s landmarks “were inserted…frankly as empty spaces. As a kind of visual silence….”

I’m glad Reverse Shot backed up my thought that “Marlon” isn’t the actual name of the character who beats Frederique in the bar, but the name she calls him cuz he looks like Brando in The Wild One.

After thinking about this movie for two weeks, I have to say that I love it completely. Rewatching the tiny half-assed hard-subtitled movie files to get screen shots of Thomas and Lili walking the Odabe beach bought tears to my eyes thinking about the film, the characters, the enormity of it all. I am so glad I went to see it. I hope for an eventual video release so everyone else can get the chance.

First movie of my Rivette Fest, to get acquainted with his work before seeing Out 1 in March. But Sam just told me that his late movies, like this one, have little in common with the early batch. So maybe my efforts are misdirected, but whatever the case, I enjoyed this one.

Lab rat Sandrine Bonnaire (Rivette’s Joan of Arc, also starred in Vagabond, East/West, Intimate Strangers, and Chabrol’s The Ceremony) hears from her brother Paul (Grégoire Colin, young star of The Intruder and Dreamlife of Angels) that old family friend Walser (Jerzy Radziwilowicz: Rivette’s Julien, Godard’s director in Passion, star of Man of Iron and Man of Marble) may have killed their father.

it all starts with a photo:

angry brother:

Rounding out a holy-shit star-studded case is their mom Francoise Fabian (of 5×2, Belle de Jour, and the title role in My Night at Maud’s) and Walser’s girlfriend Laure Marsac (of nothing in particular).

Sandrine confronts Walser and accidentally kills the girlfriend. Later, the gf’s twin sister (also Laure Marsac) shows up. Everyone is sleeping with Walser except for the brother, who’s still all hopping mad. Eventually the twin sister accidentally kills Sandrine (both deaths were caused by someone jumping in front of Walser).

dig the mobile:

dig the sexy girl:

Movie is well done and usually captivating, but every time Sandrine rides the train in the first half, it shows us the entire train ride. Goes beyond “setting the mood” and starts to get boring. Much improved in the second half (unlike most movies). A twisty little mystery movie… liked it.

a long train ride:

final shot: