destroying
themselves
by Douglas Messerli
Jacques
Rivette and Jean Gruault (screenplay), Jacques Rivette (director) Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us) / 1975,
released 1961
At first, she attempts to move ahead with
her own activities; she is a college student studying for exams. But as she
begins, one by one, to accidently reencounter the figures from the party,
meeting up with Lenz and becoming a member of his band of actors for a sort of
underground production of Shakespeare’s worst play, Pericles, and then reencountering, quite by coincidence, Philip
Kaufman, twice in the same day, she is sucked into the very circle of beings
she at first shunned.
Ultimately, she misses her exams, and
proceeds, almost like an underground detective, to find the score the dead Juan
had composed for Lenz’s production. Of course, as Luc Sante points out in his
interesting essay “Nothing Took Place but the Place Itself,” the search for the
lost guitar music is also a search “for the truth of Juan’s suicide”; but it is
also a larger metaphysical search into the reasons for her generations’—of
specifically the year 1957, when the film was made—youthful self-destruction.
The shaggy-dog nature of Rivette’s and
Gruault’s plot helps to confirm that, as Anne begins to visit, one by one,
figures connected to Juan. She first visits one of Juan’s obviously oppressed
lovers, mother to one of Juan’s children. In one particularly frightening
scene, Anne visits the home of the wealthy Dr. de Georges (Jean-Marie Robain),
who is apparently hiding something, and whose “ward,” as he describes her,
seems more than a little deranged. None of
Anne’s “visits”
actually leads to anything specific, and as much as her new friends suggest an
invisible conspiracy, they also adamantly deny it.
Still, Anne, as beautifully performed
with an-open eyed intensity by Schneider, continues her search, she uncovers
the fact that even her brother has done some “dirty work” for Dr. de Georges,
and that the others have been strangely connected to everyone. If she might
never uncover the missing tape, she, nonetheless, finds herself attracted and
inexplicably attached to Lenz, despite his critical abuse of her acting. When
Lenz also commits suicide, Yordan finally admits to Anne that something indeed
is going on, and that perhaps Pierre is on the wrong side of events.
The final few scenes are even more
confusing than the rest of this would-be “detective” tale—no more confusing,
however, than the Raymond Chandler-inspired The
Big Sleep—as Kaufman and Yordan discover that, in reality, Juan was probably
killed by agents of the Falange (Spanish Fascists). Too late, Anne discovers—for
Yordan has already shot her brother merely out of her deluded suspicions. Only
Anne can now perhaps move on. She does, after all, plan to sit for the next set
of examinations.
So, in fact, this little gathering of
conspirators has, all along, been destroying themselves. The Paris they leave
at the end of this remarkable adventure, may, after all, truly be “for us,”
those outside of their fragile self-deluded angst. And so too must we
comprehend Rivette’s fascinating fiction as precisely that, a riveting
narrative that has no real meaning in life itself. If this film, as Sante
suggests, seems a bit less fresh than the New Wave films it would help to
inform over the next few years, it is because Rivette, despite his astonishing
inventiveness, always seems to be also be looking over his shoulder back to
Cocteau and the other great theatrical imagists of French film—although finding
his own voice eventually in longer forms. It is the bridge of that past to
present filmmaking that helps us recognize Rivette as one of the most important
of contemporary French directors.
Los Angeles, May
10, 2016
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