Bulle Ogier Gets Into Taxis

     Conventionality in films seems to be desired by movie audiences and home viewers.  Could it be that this need to see only movies with traditional narrative frameworks stems from a conditioned response going back to the essentials of Western European/American storytelling?

     If audiences, from cinema's beginnings in the 1890s, had only seen abstract artistic movies, or plotless presentations, would today's viewers find what we regard as a Hollywood narrative film "bizarre, unwatchable"?

     I recall a viewing, when I was about sixteen or seventeen, of Eric Rohmer's Perceval le Gallois (Perceval the Welsh), a stripped-down retelling of the Arthurian knight Perceval's Grail Quest.  My father took my friend Paul and myself to a screening, part of the university's international film series, something put on each semester--the showing of twelve or thirteen films, around twenty-five per year.  In college I went to these screenings regularly, ate non-American films like they were a much needed nourishment.  Perceval le Gallois, though, just struck my friend and I as a waste of time; a ludicrous display of bargain basement theatrical sets and silly moments making us laugh out loud.  We exchanged disparaging comments throughout.

     My father loved the movie.  He understood the symbolism, he had read some of the Arthurian romances upon which the film is based.  In the car, driving Paul home, he told us a few things about what the movie was getting at.  We still didn't understand what value he saw in the movie, but we felt a little embarrassed about our ridicule.

     I haven't seen that film since then, some forty years ago, but I know now that one element I missed was the presence in Perceval le Gallois of the actress Pascale Ogier.  She later acted, with her mother Bulle Ogier, in Jacques Rivette's enchanting puzzle film, Le Pont du Nord.  Perceval director Eric Rohmer, too, acted in Rivette's masterpiece, Out 1.

     Two years before Out 1, Rivette made L'amour fou (1969), or Crazy Love.  His third feature film, L'amour fou shares similarities with the twelve hour and fifty minute Out 1: a classic play rehearsed but never performed, long scenes of dialogue or no dialogue, the Paris streets shot documentary-style, acting so realistic to human expression it seems as if the people onscreen are just speaking from their own minds, and an almost unheard request from the filmmaker to be patient as a viewer (to see a film without using the usual film viewing muscles--which are adrenalin-based--one uses when watching a traditional narrative).

     L'Amour fou, unlike Out 1, was shot in 16 millimeter black and white as well as 35 millimeter black and white.  The later film is mostly in color.

     Rivette had the male lead, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, direct and make all the decisions on the play rehearsals.  This play, Jean Racine's Andromaque, from 1667, harks back in subject matter to Ancient Greek stories deriving from the Trojan War.  In Out 1, two plays by Aeschylus are rehearsed.  There seems to be in Rivette a deliberate desire to distance himself from topics easily relatable to most viewers, at least in these theatrical backgrounding devices of the play rehearsals in both films.  The Racine play rehearsals in L'amour fou take up a lot of screen time.  The makings of a boring movie?  No, not when taking into account the gradual disintegration of the composure of Sébastien (Kalfont's character) over the film's four hour running time during which an attentive viewer may be awed by the downward spiral of his relationship with his mentally ill wife, Claire (the aforementioned Bulle Ogier).

     Early on, Claire, an actress herself, playing the lead female role in Racine's play, quits in a huff, complaining about the film crew documenting the rehearsals.  She can't take the distraction.  Rivette gave the fictional documentary crew total freedom to shoot the rehearsals however they wished.  Their intrusiveness, sometimes pronounced, can best be seen in Rivette's long shots pointing downward, the sound man and cameraman, along with the documentary director (André Labarthe), occupying too much space and sometimes getting in the way as actors and actresses work through their seventeenth century lines.  Sébastien says at one point: "I want the actors to feel like they're being watched."

     Claire, having quit the play, spends a lot of time in their apartment, gradually going psychotic.  She records herself saying the lines from the play spoken by the character she no longer plays.  Sébastien gives that role to Marta, a former girlfriend.  Throughout the film, he demonstrates a loose attitude about faithfulness to his wife, flirting with other women, sleeping with Marta in one scene, though not doing anything else (her choice).  

     Claire, meanwhile, looks out the window a lot, talks to herself, notes movements of people on the sidewalk, mundane activities of passersby.  She takes several cab rides, visits an old lover, has sex with him, but seems completely lacking in affect, which turns him off.  She endures play rehearsals in the apartment, left out of the artistic process by her own choice but also from her own increasingly hot madness, which seems bipolar at times, though even schizophrenic, perhaps.  In any case, Bulle Ogier's performance as a mentally troubled and more and more psychotic person is completely convincing.  

     Meanwhile, Sébastien himself loses his grip, disengaged from his theatrical production, leaving the players, the documentary crew, his good friend and assistant director, all at loose ends until he finally gets it together, or seems to, leaving them in the lurch on opening night by not showing up, and he plays one of the roles in the production!  So, they're fucked.

     Claire has left him, apparently having come to that decision during a lucid stage of her madness.  If she's heading in the direction of a psychiatrist at the end of the film, that would be a good thing.

     When Sébastien first starts to lose his grip on his theatrical work, he tells his assistant he needs a few days off, gives her instructions on what to work on.  The assistant is fine with this because she knows he's very stressed out.

     Sébastien and Claire don't go on a jaunt somewhere as they first planned, but stay in their apartment.  In a series of scenes recognizable to anyone who has gone psychotic, they start drawing on the walls, starting with erotic imagery with clean lines, but drawing over these drawings, writing words, finally tearing off pieces of the wallpaper.  They lock themselves into their bedroom, dress up in costumes and use ax and hammer to smash the doors to the living room.  They're having fun, they have sex, everything seems glowing and wonderful, and then Claire is wiped out, doesn't want to play anymore.  Sébastien doesn't argue, just gets dressed and returns to the rehearsal space, but his enthusiasm to direct the play is non-existent.  

     Enough enthusiasm comes back after a few days, and then opening night turns into his no show, another Jacques Rivettian "hanging" ending.  

     I loved this movie.  In many ways it is a lead-up to the more ambitious Out 1, but unlike that film, L'amour fou explores in richer detail the rehearsal of a single play, making that plot element a major contributor to the overall structure.  Rivette's direction of actors and actresses is without parallel in my opinion.  By that I mean, he obtains performances from them that are unlike anything one can see in other films made by different directors.  The performances in this and all of the other films of his I've seen, particularly those of the actresses, come across as real actions and reactions of human beings, even when, as in some of his more "magical" films, the performers act within fantastic reality structures.

     Rivette-land, like Alice's Wonderland, is a cinematic place where the film medium is allowed to be both realistic and abstract, even surreal, all at the same time: much like what goes on in the human mind at any given moment.  

     To return to the question asked at the beginning of this piece: could it be that the Hollywood narrative isn't realistic?  But an abstraction designed to make money imposed upon audiences conditioned to believe narrative tendencies all too subject to eventually becoming cliches?  

     In the end, it's all about what you want to watch.  I look at many types of films, I'm not a snob (I love the Bowery Boys movies, I like a CGI extravaganza, even a mediocre one, now and then) but it's my choice to watch a great variety.  I have a feeling many people don't even realize they have a choice to not watch the same shit over and over again.  They have a choice to think outside the Hollywood box.  I understand that watching a thirteen hour movie isn't for everyone, but for me, watching the much shorter two and a half hour Star Wars: Episode 8: The Last Jedi was a wretched experience getting worse and worse by the minute as I watched Carrie Fisher looking like she was about to drop dead, and this in a film directed by someone whose previous work I admire, making the whole thing even more painful.

     I don't know how to end this.  As my upstairs neighbor walks about making the floor squeak, the weather has changed, meaning my socks aren't enough to keep my feet warm.  I'll leave this essay hanging, in honor of my teacher, Rivette.

Vic Neptune