Duelle (une quarantaine)

In memory of the passing of Nouveau Vague spearhead Jacques Rivette (1928-2016), let's delve into WOMEN DUELLING, the follow-up of his pièce de résistance, CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING (1974).

The story is a convoluted mythopoeia, in modern-day Paris, with a close-knit cast of 7 (where two of them will exit the narrative earlier), it cobbles together a fantasy about two goddesses, Leni (Berto), the daughter of the moon and Viva (Ogier), the daughter of the sun, each year they only have 40 (une quarantaine) days to stay on earth. So in order to be endowed the power to remain here, both are seeking for a magic diamond, which is in the possession of a mysterious man Pierrot (Babilée, an agile dancer ), meanwhile his younger sister Lucie (Karagheuz) and his "ticket girl" Elsa (Garcia), who works in a dance club, are also drawn into the manipulative game instigated by Leni and Viva.

Shot with a subdued palette, the picture refuses to grant easy access towards the motivations of its characters at the beginning, audience can only patch pieces of information together after an occult face/off between Leni and Viva in the middle point, then the plot device becomes clear, it seems an ultimate duel between them is inevitably scheduled for the climax, but Rivette mischievously rebuffs a supernatural bravura, and outsources the task to a human being to banish both goddesses out of our universe.

As a fantasy piece, Rivette barely avails himself of special effect to sate viewers' triggered expectation, and utilises the more practical sleight of hand (editing, lightning and sound effect) to create the supernatural elements in the film. And there is a ubiquitous pianist (played by Jean Wiener) chaperons the narrative with his improvised music to condense a sublime sensation of mystics and metaphysics, conveyed through the overtly hollow and stilted dialogs.

In the main, WOMEN DUELLING is off-kilter, tongue-in-cheek and chicly inviting, a telling testimony that Rivette's cinematic wonderland is sheer one-of-a-kind, and challenges our accepted viewing habits up to the hilt!

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.

I can hardly claim to have seen all of Jacques Rivette's films, but of those I have, there were a couple that I absolutely loved; there were a couple that I greatly enjoyed to one degree or another, but which I found to be either imperfect or maybe just too dense to entirely parse. 'Duelle,' I freely admit, I more plainly struggle with, to a very particular extent. The premise is a delight - and doesn't transparently come into play until the second half. All the while, from start to finish I should have anticipated that a filmmaker like Rivette would have approached the concept very obliquely, but he nonetheless caught me off guard here. For much of these two hours the plot seems to move sideways much more than it does forward, something like one-quarter step ahead for each one or two to the side, and the identities and relevance of characters are even more clandestine up until Rivette decides to starkly illuminate them. To be perfectly honest, this took me three tries to get through, because I fell asleep twice before the first hour had elapsed.

It's splendidly well made. William Lubtchansky's cinematography is vivid and warm; Nicole Lubtchansky's editing is sharp. The costume design, hair, and makeup are lovely, and the filming locations and sets not truly any less so. Rivette illustrates a wonderfully artful eye for shot composition; just from a fundamental standpoint of the visuals this is a pleasure. The cast give tightly controlled performances of nuance and poise that I quite admire; Juliet Berto, Bulle Ogier, Hermine Karagheuz, and Nicole Garcia especially stand out. Moreover, I think the ideas that Rivette and his co-writers play with are fantastic. Would that, perhaps, the storytelling method method here weren't so extraordinarily sidelong - though in fairness, the narrative gels into a far more clear, cohesive, coherent form as the length advances. I don't think it would have stripped away any value from Rivette's artistic intent to have streamlined the course of events, allowing the first hour to bear the same qualities as the second, but then, he was the director, and not me.

For my part, I favor 'Duelle' in exact proportion to the lucidity of the tale being conveyed. In the second half, more than not, the picture is superbly imaginative, and even outright dazzling as a story of fantasy is given a low-key, modern, somewhat minimalist flavor. There is no mistaking the plot, its development, or the characters' place therein, and the viewing experience is altogether spellbinding. It's unfortunate that this high level of perceived quality is necessary to compensate for the first half, which was kind of laborious. I don't think the script is very good at the outset about establishing what is going on, nor identifying its characters or where they belong in the tableau. There is so little discernible movement in the first hour that I had a hard time truly committing; that the early scenes are more or less given substance by later ones only means that the second half has to work extra hard to pick up the slack. Once more: I don't believe it would have taken anything away from the narrative vision for this to have been more balanced and well-rounded.

Still, credit where it's due: for the excellence of its craftsmanship, and for the latent storytelling strength that very slowly comes into focus, I actually do very much like this feature. In fact, I think I like it more than Rivette's own 'Histoire de Marie et Julien,' which is something I enjoyed but found a smidgen beyond me. This 1976 movie is, after all, entertaining, engrossing, and quite satisfying. I just surely wish it were more even, for the work that we initially put in as viewers just to watch it is completely unnecessary. I appreciate the contributions of one and all, in front of and behind the camera, and when all is said and done the plot is terrific; I want only that the plot were tackled more uniformly when all is said and done. All things considered I won't begrudge anyone who looks at this and regards it more poorly, and I'm glad for those who find it even more rewarding. In light of its shortcomings I hardly thinking this is a title that demands viewership, though on the other hand, for those with the patience to endure the weaker first half, taken as a whole 'Duelle' is very much worthwhile. Be aware of its issues, in my opinion, but if one does have the opportunity to watch, at length I think it's deserving on its own merits.

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.

Duelle seems to have been instantly cursed just by being the follow-up to Celine and Julie Go Boating, to this day the only Rivette film that the average buff concerns himself with ( and oh, how wrongly. ) Having finally gotten a chance to watch the film, I can see why. Where Celine and Julie could furnish a thousand college students with thesis papers on feminine play vs. masculine order, and the construction of meaning through the assumption of various roles associated with gender, and so forth, Duelle drops the intellectual ballast completely. Rivette outs himself as a mystic with this film, closer to charlatan-geniuses like Stockhausen or Rasputin than to Godard. This movie is almost like a Rosetta Stone, more dense and concentrated than anything else he's done, that the future expert will be able to use to decode his work.

Rivette's overt and unmistakable belief in the eternal presence of God and Satan on earth makes this film unfashionable to the materialistic tastes of the cultured liberal brute. If it were less sincere, this film could have been one of Rivette's most popular. There is always something special about the first collaboration between a cinematographer and a director who would later go on to make a more-or-less permanent team -- such as Ballhaus and Fassbinder with the equally undervalued Whity -- and Duelle marks the first time Rivette worked with William Lubtchansky, who has been his right arm all the way up until Marie and Julien. Lubtchansky takes Rivette out of the scratchy 16 mm. ghetto and right into glossy, bejewelled Eurotrash, complete with a gliding Ophuls camera and Sternberg lighting. Only Harry Kumel made more stylish, elegant movies in the 70's than Duelle, though they are lesser in terms of content. But Rivette still takes pains, as always, to make the film feel deliberately antique, faded, so that it will be perfect for revival in the interplanetary silent movie theatres of the future.

This movie is so attuned to my mental state that I felt like I was writing it as it proceeded, but most people will probably just find it incomprehensible. Rivette revels not in contradictions but in SEEMING contradictions. Bulle Ogier, apparently playing God, counts backwards all the time, kills the hero's girlfriend and attacks another important character with flames, yet she is still God, and still perfect good. There are many lines that will probably annoy non-devotees of French poetry, such as "The dream is the night's aquarium." And what does it mean when Jean Babilee, outdoing Travolta, raises his arm and smashes a dancehall mirror through telekinesis? Why does he wake up in the bottom of a parking garage and talk about killing a sister we've never seen ( not incidentally named Sylvie, like the innocent Sandrine Bonnaire in 1998's Secret Defense? ) Why does he become graceful and muscular, almost superhuman, when Bulle Ogier counts backwards and changes the universe to black-and-white? Why does Juliet Berto keep changing her costume? How do you escape the dancehall? If you know the answers to these questions, then it's time for you to assume the role of Sphinx, and maybe one day join Rivette in the stars.