Duelle (une quarantaine)

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.

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.

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.

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).

Duelle is certainly bound to be interesting for most Rivette fans; seeing his take on a shorter, more "action" based movie interested me quite a lot at least, and outside the bounds of Rivette's work, Duelle is very unique and interesting by itself as a movie.

Overall, the characters and atmosphere are created very well, and the movie doesn't drag at all, in my opinion. That said, it does feel like the movie is lacking something that would make it stand out or leave a strong lasting impression.

If I had to guess, it would be, for me, that the goddesses don't have much more motivation than 'staying on earth' and that motive isn't given much depth throughout the movie. I also think that the sudden shift around the one hour mark with the two goddesses facing off was done well, but the movie up until then didn't flesh out some of the characters well enough for the movie to pivot in the way it did without friction.

Overall, I like it, and I would recommend watching it, but it doesn't dazzle me all around.