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It opens and closes in the whiteness of an empty stage, as in Persona the actress walks off. Racine's Andromaque in endless rehearsals, the director (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) dithers while the original Hermione, his wife (Bulle Ogier), unravels at home. The performers are put through their paces, their repetitions are grainily captured by a documentary crew, dissonant recordings fill the Parisian air—all of it is essential to Jacques Rivette, filmed with an instantaneity that grows voluminous, sinister, fatiguing, liberating. The heroine suspects infidelity and waxes paranoid to drum accompaniment ("I see all, I know all. I remember... and I wait"), moments later she's straddling her husband in bed, ready to sink a needle into his sleeping eyeball. Entropy in art and relationships, the prescription is breakdown. "I have a suitcase in my head. Squeeze hard or it will open." Theater versus life, also theater versus cinema, plus the curving pan of 35mm versus the darting zoom of 16mm. Classical material, modernist scrutiny, a severe winnowing—get to the center of the Russian doll and throw it away. Suspended rehearsals give way to marital therapy with the purgative demolition of the couple's apartment: Doors dismantled, hatchets hurled at television sets, wallpaper ripped for the bare canvas underneath, a sustained tour de force with numerous reverberations (Last Tango in Paris, La Grande Bouffe, The Seventh Continent). The madness that might be an awakening, just the thing for a vision of authorship overthrown. "The best way to present characters is to show what they project." A work so dense that Cassavetes had only to glance its way to extract both A Woman Under the Influence and Opening Night, and so august that Rivette could only advance it by locating its comedy (Céline et Julie vont en bateau). With Josée Destoop, Maddly Bamy, Michèle Moretti, Françoise Godde, Michel Delahaye, and André S. Labarthe. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |