the
deep purse
by Douglas Messerli
Bulle Ogier, Pascale Ogier, Suzanne Schiffman, Jacques Rivette, and Jérôme Prieur (writers), Jacques Rivette (director) Le Pont du Nord / 1981
The marvel of many of
Jacques Rivette’s films is not only that they are, in part, actor generated—he
often works in collaboration with his actors for his texts—but that they are
willing to take strange, sometimes disjunctive directions that engage their audiences
in a voyage on which few other films or even fictions are willing to embark.
Combining fantasy with a kind of political thriller, a murder mystery with an
imaginary children’s game seemingly based on the arrondissments of Paris, a
travelogue with a love tale, Le Pont du Nord crams into its
129 minutes overlaying and even contradictory cinematic genres reminding one,
somewhat, of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierre le Fou of 1965.
Yet
in Rivette’s witty telling, it might be hard to identify the “fool.” Although
it is Marie (the beautiful Bulle Ogier), a vaguely politically involved
criminal recently released from jail, who is killed at the end of the film, she
is less foolish and more in control of her destiny it appears than the young
punk-karate-swinging, moped-riding girl who literally runs into Marie and
refuses to let her go, Baptiste (Pascale Ogier). Although Baptiste appears to
be strong and determined to protect her new acquaintance, she is ensnared in a
large cocoon, haunted by paranoid visions of spies and terrified by
surveillance of figures all named Max, and clueless of where to go and what to
do in the women’s four-day voyage throughout the city. Although at moments it
appears that her relationship with Marie is a kind of lesbian attraction, it is
more likely that she (as the real-life daughter of Bulle), is the dependent in
need of a kind of mother. Although neither woman has a place in which to live,
let alone sleep, Marie has money to buy food and other things and a bag which
seems to contain everything from different costumes, make-up, food stuffs, and
any many other necessities. Baptiste has only her karate and paranoid
suspicions of being watched, which forces her to take a knife to the eyes of
even advertising posters.
But those arms seem no more protecting than
Baptiste’s; Julien is attempting to quickly close a mysterious “deal” which, he
assures Marie, will allow them to move away in order to lead a new life. Either
out of jealousy or simple curiosity Baptiste steals Julien’s briefcase,
replacing it with another, and thus bollixing up his clandestine deal. What the
women discover within the briefcase is an odd assortment of Xeroxed newspaper
clippings, various and unrelated lines marked in red—including a piece that
mentions Marie. They return these to Julien on another of his sudden visits.
They keep another strange document, seemingly a map of Paris but, according to
Marie, is a little-known game she played as a child where in an apparently
cabalistic pattern one arrives at various dangerous points in time and space:
the inn, the tower, the bridge, etc, some resulting in imprisonment or death,
others in the possibility of beginning the voyage again.
Finally, at the bridge of the film’s title, Baptiste discovers a gigantic
dragon, a marvelous construction that appears to be mix of a fire-spouting
oil-derrick and a modernistic children’s ride, which Baptiste slays. Marie calls
Julien, promising him the return of the map, while Baptiste, having stolen
Marie’s gun, murders a man who had prevented her friend from entering the
telephone booth. Finally confronting her strange shadow, Marie declares that
her friend is insane, and marches forward to wait for Julien, who, when he
encounters her, shoots and kills her, proclaiming “I loved you.”
Of course, there is no answer. Rivette’s film is not
a coherent narrative, ready to provide an easy summary to its often-obscure
events. Rather, the director takes us on an exhilarating ride where, as he puts
it, he “upsets people.” “The film must be, if not an ordeal, at least an
experience, something which makes the film transform the viewer, who has
undergone something through the film, who is no longer the same after having
seen the film.”
Once one has entered a Rivette film, all
other films seem slightly ploddingly predictable, the script or story
determining events. In Le Pont du Nord we do not know why things
happen, or how they happened, or even if they
happened. One might imagine, that like the magical game behind the character’s
movements, that seeing this film again might allow us to create a very
different perception of what we are witnessing—that Marie might just as easily
dig deep into her purse and pull out another plot!
Los Angeles, October 12,
2012
Reprinted from Nth
Position (November 2012).
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