Unsterbliches Duell

The Queen of the Night battles the Queen of the Sun over a magical diamond that will allow the winner to remain on Earth, specifically in modern day Paris.

Marilù Parolini originally came from Italy, but moved to France where she got mixed up in the French New Wave movement. As part of that, she wrote this "experimental fantasy" with her husband, director Jacques Rivette. At this point, he had just finished "Celine and Julie Go Boating" (1974), which is among his best-known films today.

Star Juliet Berto also came out of "Boating", though she is more generally associated with the work of Godard. Co-star Bulle Ogier is more often seen as a Rivette regular, though the two appeared in many of the same films. Ogier also has the distinction of being in Luis Bunuel's "Discreet Charm", which is widely loved by critics (though I was less than impressed).

Rivette is relatively precise in his dealings with meaning. He is the most atavistically ceremonious of the Vague, in the sense that his abstraction as a journey leading inwards is always attended by signs and codas that affirm our passage. The transcendent rite of passage, in more ways than one, is about the symbolic enactment that paves the way. The transcendence itself is left to our sphere of experience, but we're at least brought to the doorstep.

Oh, there's the improvisational flow that seems to throw people off, that things seem to be randomly bubbling up from nothing without significant plan or substance. The chance encounters in a world that we may recognize, the geography vaguely familiar whose nature is yet ultimately insoluble. There's a lot of that here. As in Celine, it is the breathing space that conducts our preparation to step beyond the mechanisms of reason. We don't reason with it, rather trust its intuitive flow. Like the dream world, it is only the figment of the known world spontaneously arisen as a stage or blank slate for the atavistic portents and divinations of the subconscious mind to be writ.

But the rite of passage matters, in spite of the seemingly aimless wandering. Here it is about human effort to bypass the 'wall of paradise' constituted by the coincidence of apparent opposites (good and evil, light and dark, being and non-being). A barrier that obscures vision and traps in a world of names and forms that is only an apparent reality.

Rendered in the film as twin goddesses of sun and moon, vying for a precious stone that enables their descend into the human world. The human characters are mere pawns to their schemes; to be seduced, tricked, threatened, or ultimately destroyed. Twin femme fatales, weaving spells in an inverse noir universe magnified into a macrocosmic struggle.

The ill-prepared man who chances to steal a glimpse of them in their true form, like in the myth of Actaion who steals upon the Greek goddess Artemis bathing naked in a pool, has his consciousness shattered by the revelation. His mirrored image (the soul, the reflected half) is cracked.

The woman who finally shatters the illusionary duality that quarantines human consciousness into meaningless dilemmas, does so by a sacrifice of blood.

And this is the problem of the film. So much of it is a stridently symbolic enactment, a matter of ceremony. The sacrifice is, quite literally, a matter of spilling blood upon the symbolic stone and does not flow from anything - it is simply the schematic end of the spiritual myth. Although valuable as insight, the meaning of the film is trapped inside the rituals performed to signify it. Having cracked the outer shell to absorb it, the film seizes to resonate.

Having seen at least one title by most of the other major directors of the French New Wave (FNW) movement, I was excited to find that Arrow has put out a Jacques Rivette, which I got for the upcoming ICM French Challenge.Just before the challenge kicked off,I got a really nasty flu. Wanting join in,I decided the film with the shortest run-time would be my first Rivette.

View on the film:

Complimented by interesting interviews from two members of the cast, Arrow present a splendid transfer, with the layered soundtrack being clean and the picture sharp, whilst retaining a film grain quality.

Working more from a script than he had done before, (lines of dialogue would be thrown out to the cast just before shooting began) the screenplay by co-writer/(with Eduardo de Gregorio and the directors wife Marilu Parolini ) directing auteur Jacques Rivette fittingly has a free-flowing rhythm that gives it the feeling of unfolding in the moment, as The Queen of the Night fights The Queen of the Sun for a diamond to stay on earth, which shines them into slithering round the deserted night life of Paris. Shattering whatever little reality there was, the writers keep the thread of the diamond fight as a solid line for the flights of fantasy to leap from.

Placing the two Queens (brilliantly played by Juliet Berto and Bulle Ogier) in a fight to stay on earth for more than 40 days a years, director Rivette & cinematographer William Lubtchansky take the starkness of the French New Wave (FNW) and shade it onto the Sci-Fi and Fantasy in the streets of Paris being laid to a minimalist appearance, as the Queens fight against a backdrop of lone, scattered figures round the streets of Paris. Kept backed by a nicely underscored improvised piano score from André Dauchy and Roger Fugen, Rivette blurs the lines between fantasy and reality with rough-edge FNW hand-held tracking shots following each grasp for the diamond. Symbolically breaking a mirror 70 mins in, Rivette superbly goes all-out for a surrealist stylisation final. Lighting the queens in shimmering colours, Rivette creates an incredibly eerie impression of the diamond fight taking place in reflections of a lost in time and dissociate society, as the Queens face their duelle.

This is part one of what was to be Jacques Rivette's four-part project "Scenes de la Vie Parallelle". The idea was to create four different films with a running sub-plot involving a mythical war between goddesses of the Sun and the Moon, fighting for possession of a mysterious jewel. This one was a "film noir" modelled after "The Seventh Victim" (which Rivette screened for the cast before the shooting began) with bits of "Kiss Me Deadly", "Lady From Shanghai" and "Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne" thrown in for good measure. An uncanny mood piece it takes place in a weirdly unpopulated Paris. Jean Weiner (who used to play piano at "Le Bouef sur le Toit") supplies live piano improvisations here, much in the manner of an accompanist for a silent movie.

"Noroit" the second film in this series was a pirate adventure movie inspired by "Moonfleet" utilizing Tourneur's "The Revenger's Tragedy" as a frequently recited text --much in the way that Cocteau's "The Knights of the Roundtable" is quoted here.

After these two Rivette began "Marie et Julien" with Albert Finney and Leslie Caron, but suffered a nervous breakdown three days into shooting. This brought the project to an end. This year (2003) however, he's gone back to "Marie et Julien" again with Emmanuelle Beart and Jerzy Radzilowitz. Maybe the four-part project will be compeleted after all.

Just as "Céline et Julie vont en bateau" owed a great deal to the American cinema of the fifties,so its follow-up "Duelle" pays homage to certain films of the forties,in particular the work of Jacques Tourneur whose work created the maximum of suspense and fear with the minimum of means.This slight,ghostly tale of two goddesses of the sun and the moon who are permitted to spend only forty days on earth per year has a strange,ethereal quality which recalls the ambiguity and hidden menace of "Cat People".The playing in the lead roles of Rivette regulars Bulle Ogier and Juliet Berto is mesmerising,whilst the settings in a race-track,run-down hotel,a deserted metro station and a dance hall have a seedy,haunted feeling,and while the story might seem rather opaque,Rivette has confirmed that in order to understand it fully it is necessary to read two French novels,"Le Carnaval" and "La Femme celte" which are unfortunately both out of print.