JacquesRivette Tagged Articles at Cinematical

In describing today's best directors, three terms are generally used (and overused): Maverick, Genius and Auteur. A "maverick" is now used to describe virtually anyone who makes a movie without using Hollywood money. An "auteur" is used to describe anyone who writes as well as directs. And "genius" is used to describe anyone who makes a halfway decent film. I'm taking these words back. In reality, a "maverick" should be a button-pusher. It's a filmmaker who is so radical and daring that even high-minded, forward-thinking critics sneer at their work, people like Vincent Gallo or Catherine Breillat. These people are so dangerous that they have trouble making and distributing films. Harmony Korine, director of Mister Lonely (5 screens) is very much a maverick. Korine has pushed many buttons and many envelopes over the years and though I love his work, he's someone I wouldn't want to invite to my house. (He scares me.)

Werner Herzog, director of Encounters at the End of the World (1 screen), is also a maverick (and, incidentally, a buddy of Korine's). His physically dangerous films have probably had insurance companies slamming the door in his face, and his co-workers have included people who might not be fit for polite society. (At the very least, most of them would turn heads.) Some of his actors have reportedly threatened to kill him. It cracks me up that, because Herzog's documentary Grizzly Man was such a hit, Herzog was allowed to make his new film for the Discovery Channel. I'd really love to have been in on that board meeting. Did they really know who they were dealing with? At the same time, Herzog is also an auteur: all of his films have the same roaming curiosity, fearlessly exploring man's tenuous connection to nature, from Aguirre navigating the Amazon looking for El Dorado, to Timothy Treadwell seeking to befriend the bears.

Like a collector of stray dogs, I have likewise assembled my personal canon of misfit filmmakers, artists who have fallen out of fashion or just never caught on. Jacques Rivette, whose new The Duchess of Langeais (6 screens) is currently struggling in art house theaters, is a prime example. According to his bio on the IMDB, he has always nestled in an uncomfortable place between film snobs and film populists. His films are too playful for intellectuals and yet too severe for mainstream consumption. He was a critic at Cahiers du Cinema alongside Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol (some of his writing has been translated to English; I especially love his piece on Howard Hawks and the 1952 film Monkey Business) yet his work does not seem like that of a film buff; it springs more from literature and from his own temperament. Indeed, he's very hard to pin down, perhaps partially because hardly anyone has seen very many of his films. His 12-1/2 hour film Out 1 (1972), which has been called his greatest achievement, has screened in America so few times that probably less than a thousand people have seen it.

79 year-old French New Wave master Jacques Rivette once directed a film called Out1 that clocked in at just under thirteen hours, but The Duchess of Langeais, his latest film which plays at a traditional feature length, comes across at times like one of those marathon efforts. Slow-moving to the point of stillness and comprised of an unremarkable succession of master shots that bespeak a director focused entirely on the performances and totally unbothered by cinematography, the film's only salvation is a remarkably graceful turn by Jeanne Balibar as the titular duchess -- a coy aristrocrat in Restoration France called Antoinette who alleviates her boredom with life by playing love games with Armand, a young Naval officer played here by Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gerard. Game is the operative word, because what they engage in over the course of the film is not a genuine passion but a kind of unhealthy mutual fascination that mostly revolves around her superior social position in French society and the ways in which it may frustrate his romantic intentions.

Based on Balzac's 1834 novel, the film begins with a late scene in which Armand encounters his other half in a Carmelite nunnery long after their affair has gone cold. Using his pull as an officer, he gains access to the convent and tries to broker some time alone with Antoinette, but there's very little useful information exchanged between the two of them before she interrupts the proceedings by screamingly confessing to her mother superior that the man in question is a former lover, which breaks everything up immediately. The film then jumps back to the very beginning, at the moment of the first encounter during a ball. This, it turns out, will be something of a running theme, with Armand almost pathologically unable to articulate his feelings -- if he has genuine feelings, something of a question -- and constrained by values of his own. It's those values that the film needs to shine a stark light on in order to understand Armand's later actions -- leaving the film, audiences may know little more about his motivations than when they entered the theater.