a test of faith
by Douglas Messerli
Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent
and Jacques Rivette (screenplay), Jacques Rivette (director) Histoire de Marie et Julien (The Story of Marie and Julien) / 2003
The two other women in this tale, Marie (Emmanuelle Béart) and Adrienne
(Bettina Kee) are ghosts haunting Julien and Madame X, the later recognizing,
obviously, that her sister is a revenant, while Julien seems not to have a clue
about Marie. Having committed suicide, both these women cannot cross over and
are doomed to return to the corrupt world they had hoped to leave; both of
these characters also had terrible relationships with those they loved.
Even Julien’s cat, Nevermore, is unfriendly and “condescending” to human
beings, as Madame X, a cat lover, describes it. Indeed “Nevermore,” it is
hinted, may have been Julien’s former lover’s cat; its attention is constantly
turning to another floor of Julien’s house, where the woman left behind her
clothes and possessions when she ran away with another man. At one point, the
cat betrays Julien by showing Marie where he has hidden the documents key to
blackmailing Madame X.
Rivette’s is a fallen world, in other words, wherein characters, living
and dead, are forced to pay for their evil deeds and must work in the present
to correct their pasts. It is no accident that Julien is a master restorer of
old clocks, a man dedicated to “fixing” time. But as his cat’s name hints, the
past can never truly be restored.
As Michael J. Anderson has correctly argued in an essay in Senses of Cinema: “Rivette’s films are
devoid of morality. Nor could there be, given that most of what is contained
therein belongs to the category of fiction. In this way, Rivette has preserved
a tradition in French film that commenced with Georges Méliès, achieved maturity
in the serials of Louis Feuillade, and reached its apogee in the postwar work
of Jean Cocteau. Like these forebears, Rivette avoids neat delineation between
fact and fiction, and dream and reality, opting rather for a universe in which
all thoughts, actions and events maintain the same degree of verisimilitude.”
Unlike Anderson, however, I do not read this film primarily as a
statement about filmmaking but, rather, about how any creator of fiction works
toward a representation that remains meaningful to lived experience. In the Story of Marie and Julien Rivette
interweaves various cinematic and literary sources—the director purposely
references some of his own previous films and the movies The Sixth Sense and The
Others, as well Poe and Celtic myth— in an
He first attempted to realize this film in 1975, but stopped shooting
after only a few days because of a physical and mental breakdown. Accordingly,
his decision to return to the subject in 2003 was a true test of his faith in
his ability to transform the artifice of his fictional characters into figures
that might mean something to his audiences.
Rivette purposely reminds us that this is a fiction, and that his actors
are actors delivering “lines,” often permitting them to utter overly-long
monologues in the kind of flat monotone of voice that we might associate with
the New York School poets of the 1960s and 70s, when it seemed “uncool” to show
too much emotion.
Julien, particularly, pads around his shabby castle with the look of a
slightly corpulent beast, cleaning off his dinner table by brushing the crumbs
to the floor and then sweeping them away with a broom. There is a purposeful
laziness even to his work-time activities, which perhaps explains why he cannot
be convinced to travel elsewhere to fix clocks as one his former clients asks
him to do. His laziness may also explain why he is determined to blackmail
Madame X, when even she recognizes that he’s not the “blackmailing type.” We
too wonder how a man so gentle with his cat and caring with his clocks can be
involved in such a dirty act. He clearly wants the easy money, and when Madame
X does not obey his rules, he almost arbitrarily demands ten times the amount
he has originally asked. Does he really care whether she comes through? And
what might he do in retaliation if she does not?
The beautiful ghost Marie may attract him, but Rivette suggests that she
may be dangerous in the film’s first moments: he dreams of her turning on him
with a knife. When, soon after, he actually does run into her, she proposes a
meeting at a local café but does not show up. And when she reappears, inviting
him to dinner, she moves out of her apartment the very next morning while he
sleeps in her bed.
Rivette further confounds realistic conventions by portraying Madame X
as a graceful and rather forgiving victim. She appears to be almost relieved to
have to pay for her lies, even if she objects to Julien’s sudden upping of the
ante. And throughout she seems slightly sympathetic to her blackmailer.
Surely it is not accidental that Madame X doesn’t have a real name (and,
when Marie becomes involved in the blackmail scheme and comes to be known as
“the other person.”)
The director goes out of his way, finally, to clarify that his
presentation of the “real” world is a manipulated one. He literarily divides
his film into sections that point to the narrative relationship of his
characters. At several times throughout the film, the ambient noise of the bars
and cafés suddenly goes quiet, only soon after to return. Lighting shifts from
natural to theatrical. Costumes often reflect the characters state of being,
drawing attention to their artifice, particularly when Marie attempts to try on
some of the ill-fitting clothes Julien’s former lover has left behind. With
regard to Marie, costuming becomes even a topic of conversation, with Julien
promising to buy
Rivette signals Brecht as he keeps the audience in a suspension of
disbelief. Yet, I would argue, he does this not to engage a meta-critique of
filmmaking, but rather as a test of his audience’s willingness to believe in
his characters.
It would be difficult in any Rivette film, to name all of his sources.
But here, as many critics have noted, we see numerous elements of Alfred
Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), a film
that also features unlikeable characters: a failed police detective, a
secretary having an affair with a murderer, and the murderer himself (even the
judge in Vertigo is quite despicable
in his lecturing of Scottie after Madeline’s supposed death). Like Vertigo,
moreover, the characters are given a chance to redeem themselves, but fail once
again.
One of the most significant of literary references is Julien’s mention
of Bluebeard, Perreault’s tale about
a man who has killed several of his wives before marrying a woman very much
like Marie. And indeed, as Marie attempts to uncover her lover’s past by going
through the possessions of his former lover, we have the sense of going from
room to room, as in the original tale, with fresh revelations of his bastardly
deeds. Although we later discover that she is merely using these closed-off
rooms to recreate her own dark past, it does not alter the fact that Julien has
never revealed why his previous lover so suddenly fled his company that she
took none of her possessions with her.
The only times throughout this long film that Rivette’s characters seem
believable is during sexual encounters—even as they play fantastical verbal
games built on literary and sadomasochistic fantasies. It is only at those
moments, which so many actors find the most difficult to portray, that they are
truly able to express themselves.
By film’s end, Julien is ready to join his Marie in suicide. Yet
strangely, she saves him from her own fate by pulling down a noose before he
can place it around his neck and, soon after, grabbing a knife out of his
hands. With a magical gesture—and one must admit, an absurdly artificial
gesture right out of Orphée—she
forces him to forget her very existence.
But
in that forgetfulness, she becomes less of a symbol and more of a
three-dimensional being, one who must win love as we all must. Observing him
now asleep and oblivious to their past, she weeps, her tears transforming a
previous bloodless injury into “real” blood: the ghost come back to life.
Waking from what seemed to be a dream,
Julien cannot imagine who she is and, as mentioned above, declares she is not
his type, in response to which, she simply asks for him to give her a little
time. As the screen blackens, Blossom Dearie belts out her jazz standard “Our
Day Will Come.”
Whether or not you believe that their day will come depends on how
you’ve responded to what’s gone before. Rivette predicted that his film would
be a matter of personal opinion: "This I know in advance—whether it is
good or not, some people will love it and others will hate it." Some will
surely remain cynical, bored, and disappointed. I say, yes, the characters are
now real enough that I believe in the myth Rivette’s art has created. For me,
his test of faith has proven him right.
Los Angeles, February 4, 2016
Reprinted from Hyperallergic Weekend (February 14, 2016)
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