Dir. Jacques Rivette, 2003, France, 150 mins, subtitles
Cast:
Emmanuelle Béart, Jerzy Radziwilowicz, Anne Brochet, Bettina Kee, Olivier Cruveiller, Mathias Jung, Nicole Garcia
Originally planned in the late 1970s as the first of a fantasy trilogy (Duelle and Noirot make up the second and third parts), Histoire de Marie et Julien sees Jacques Rivette return to the labyrinthine supernatural puzzle pieces of earlier films such as Céline and Julie Go Boating. In Céline and Julie, the plot and the characters are not restricted to following a logical or necessarily understandable line of action. In Marie and Julien, the characters seem to be nothing more than jigsaw pieces searching for an overall picture. Events happen, characters appear, and things are said that make no sense whatsoever while watching the film but begin to build a pattern that makes itself clear only towards the end.
Julien (Radziwilowicz), a grumpy and rather childish middle-aged clock mender, is blackmailing a silk manufacturer called Madame X (Brochet) for money. He bumps into Marie (Béart), a girl he had fallen in love with a year ago when they were both involved with someone else and they start seeing each other. Marie, however, has a tendency to go missing now and again and after she moves in with Julien, and begins to spend most of her time locked away redecorating an upstairs bedroom. When she begins to help Julien with his blackmail plans, Marie keeps meeting Madame X's sister, Adriane (Kee), who we discover is actually dead. What is the strange bond between Marie and this girl? And what exactly is Marie doing up in that room? Julien, who has fallen deeply in love with her, decides to investigate what happened to Marie during the previous year.
Although the film attempts to place all of these conundrums into some kind of cohesive pattern, too much is left unexplained to make sense of. It also tries too hard to place meaning onto everything, placing the dream-like occurrences into some kind of cod-psychoanalytical trap in which the slightest movement must have some important relevance in the final analysis. This ends up giving the film a kind of pretentious and unintentional comic self-importance. Some scenes feel as though they are straight out of a French and Saunders piss-take of "pretentious arty-farty foreign films" - for example, the importance placed on a hand-gesture seen in a dream is particularly cringe-inducing (anyone strongly anti-mime, beware!). In fact, many elements are difficult to believe in - the love affair between Marie and Julien for a start. What exactly is it that attracts the beautiful and mysterious Marie to the grumpy and rumpled middle-aged Julien? The sex scenes, of which there are many interspersed throughout the film, show Marie and Julien making up fantasy stories for each other, and although beautifully lit sweat-glistening bodies fill the screen, these scenes lack any spark of eroticism and actually become boring and tiresome. If the love affair between Marie and Julien is not convincing to the audience, what reason do they have to believe in any other part of the film?
All of which is such a shame. Histoire de Marie et Julian is full of charm, warmth, and at times, succeeds in being very clever, as is only expected from such a formidable filmmaker as Rivette (L'Amour Fou, La Belle Noiseuse, and Va Savoir to name but a few). The film looks great, is expertly directed (the scene in which Julien visits Marie's old boarding room is particularly gripping), and has an intriguing story about love, death, and the afterlife. The performances, in particular Radziwilowicz, are all engaging. The acting prize, however, must go to Neverland the cat who manages to upstage everyone when on screen. In its first appearance in the film the cat's obvious irritation to the camera and the sound equipment is turned cleverly into a rather nifty clue to a future plot point.
What isn't so successful is the idea that the film is a mix of love story, mystery, and ghost story, where the relationship or the fantasy elements do not convince, falling instead into territory somewhere between art-house pretension and unconscious parody.
Angus Macdonald
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