Out 1

Jacques Rivette's 13 hours of mystery, anxiety, and stupefying improvisation must be experienced as a whole for the sense of transcendent expansion to fully take hold. "Paris and its double" registered through the 16mm lens, with Aeschylus, Balzac, and Carroll uttered less as texts of foundation than as unreliable lighthouses in the turbulent ocean of contemporary life. Michèle Moretti envisions Seven Against Thebes as visceral choreography, while Michael Lonsdale's troupe gropes through Prometheus Bound in a procession of intuitive freakouts—dilations of L'Amour fou and dueling productions of theater, interpretation, search for meaning. Elsewhere, Jean-Pierre Léaud gets people to pay him not to play his harmonica and Juliet Berto mooches from café customers and playacts at extortion with filched letters. Others include Bulle Ogier's elegantly hippified boutique owner, Bernadette Lafont's isolated writer and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze's chess-playing ex-radical, autonomous creatures with autonomous realities, brushing against each other until Rivette's design of codes and messengers becomes clear. Léaud receives a cryptic note and uses it as the point of departure for an inquiry into the void, a doomed attempt at imposing a narrative onto the world's randomness which leads to a dead end. Or does it? The playful-ominous netherworld of cabals and conspiracies might be willed into being through belief ("The fact of being the suspect creates the crime"), though in the end all that's left is the pipe dream, the need to have faith in the possibility of interconnection. A post-May '68 lament, a tickling "game of patience," a lecture on Balzac by Eric Rohmer, a brilliant succession of deadpan gags, a mirror reflecting into infinity. Rivette's transformative "pure hazard," couched in the bare image that holds a thousand enigmas. With Hermine Karagheuz, Karen Puig, Pierre Baillot, Marcel Bozonnet, Sylvain Corthay, Edwine Moatti, Bernadette Onfroy, Barbet Schroeder, Monique Clément, Michel Berto, and Françoise Fabian.