If Rivette sounds like a mercurial quantity, that’s because he is — ordinary beauty, pyrotechnics, narrative logic, and character psychology don’t interest him in the least. Describing the plot of Céline and Julie is hopeless. There’s Paris, as empty and odd as an abandoned playground; there’s the two unacquainted eponymous Parisiennes (vampy Juliet Berto and frumpy Dominique Labourier), a mysterious house they either discover or know about already, and a unchanging Henry James melodrama unfolding inside involving a child, her father (Rivette producer Barbet Schroeder), two untrustworthy women (Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier), and a nursemaid enacted by either Céline or Julie as they enter or exit according to unknowable laws. It’s not a story and never intends to be — it’s a joyous parable about cinema and a naked exploration of film’s reflexive wonders, and one of the most sublime expressions of friendship in the medium. You can’t accurately define Céline and Julie as “meta” — self-acknowledging in the Godardian fashion that Godard has make look so easy. Instead, the movie is self-knowing, the difference between Pound and Eliot. Céline and Julie is a shadow play, but it’s also the endless, enveloping dream experience movies have promised us since their beginnings.
Rivette made shorter films, too, though none is under two hours, and DUELLE (1976; January 9 at 6:30 pm), NOROÎT/NOR’WEST (1976; January 9 at 8:45 pm), and HISTOIRE DE MARIE ET JULIEN/THE STORY OF MARIE AND JULIEN (2003; February 17 at 7 pm + February 19 at 8 pm) actually make up three parts of a planned quartet, “Les filles de feu.” Histoire de Marie et Julien, his latest and along with new films by Eric Rohmer and Chantal Akerman subjected to the indignity of going straight to underpublicized DVD in this country, is a seething gem and the most symptomatic film he’s made in years, a romantic mystery without facts set in a borderland Paris of anxious suspension. “What is happening?”, Emmanuelle Béart’s æthereal femme says at one point, apropos of nothing. Who can answer with certainty?
‘JACQUES RIVETTE: A DIFFERENTIAL CINEMA’ | Harvard Film Archive | January 5-February 19
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