L'amour fou

Yes, on the face of it, four hours spent in the company of stage actors rehearsing a Racine play might seem excessive. After all, how many changes can Rivette ring on a discontented couple who do all sorts of things to hurt each other? How many times can Claire cheat on Sebastien with that weedy fellow, and how many times can Sebastien flirt with the brunette who's going to replace Claire as Andromaque? Whatever the answer, I have to say I find the whole thing fascinating. The film crew sent in to cover the proceedings seems to comment on everything. At times it has the air of a high school dramatic society offering, at other times it's deadly serious.

The performers do everything expected of them. Bulle Ogier became Rivette's favourite actress; she is stunning. Bright, sullen, depressed, elated--she goes through it all. Kalfon appeared in a later film, L'amour par terre, as a playwright. He's all silky assurance until the confused ending. A wonderful experience, a must for Rivette enthusiasts.

Extraordinary and long film by Rivette, who reinvents himself with this kind of mockumentary about theatre, full of dead times, and which defines many of the aspects of what will be the director's work from now on.

By no means a rehearsal for Out 1, but a great film absolutely mature in itself, and as interesting as the more famous and marathonian following work.

Claire and Sebastian are a married couple of actors from the Parisian experimental scene, embarking on the project of representing Andromaque by Racine. Sebastian is also the stage manager. The film begins when, after a dispute over how to recite a reply, Claire decides to leave the project and Sebastian replaces her with Marta.

With Sebastian embarking on this project that he is passionate about but very minority oriented and Claire without a job (and not interest in finding it) and spending the mornings recording herself on a tape recorder, surprisingly it does not seem that they have financial problems to make ends meet.

The film alternates scenes of private life with long rehearsals being filmed by a television crew.

Sebastian's rants about his revolutionary concept of acting are very typical of the time, posing a way that they want to pass off as revolutionary. The rehearsals, to call them somehow, naturally take place on an empty stage and the actors, to call them something, read their parts in the purest zombie style with a tone of unbearable laconicism. What is supposed to internalize emotions is actually shown as disinterest or inability to express them.

This is repeated in the relationships of the characters offstage: Claire and Sebastian apparently love each other, but there is a certain coldness and self-absorption that is frightening. Sebastian doesn't even show real interest in his infidelities, and rarely comes out of a distanced laconicism, and Claire shows her superficiality when she capriciously wants to buy herself a dog (buying herself is the best way to call it) because she likes the photograph of a pet on the cover of an album. .

Claire begins to show clear signs of imbalance and depression. She wanders around the house, while Sebastian sleeps (apparently) terrifyingly caressing her eyelids with a needle...

At one point, without us having witnessed any specific crisis, Sebastian decides to spend his nights at the theater, while Claire slits her wrists in an apparent clumsy suicide attempt. But in the next scene we have them casually spending an afternoon together, as playfully distant as ever.

There is something annoying and unpleasant in the environment and in the behavior of the characters, an emotional emptiness that is almost terrifying: like the actors on stage who seem to be talking to themselves, unable to show their emotions and declaiming without any conviction a text that seems impossed to them, in the same way outside the essays the characters are equally isolated, laconic and self-absorbed.

I like Rivette's concept of de-dramatizing his films, and lengthening the times, giving us the illusion of a world that runs with absolute naturalness. Even in the more eventful second part of the film, we don't get that feeling of stepping into a movie plot.

The second part is more dynamic, the long scenes are mostly replaced by agile parallel editing, the shots are shortened, there is a planning of the scenes and a manipulation of the contents with expressive purposes that becomes more evident. Even the rehearsals begin to be manipulated in the editing, interspersing different scenes and making their character as a commentary on the actors' own lives more clear.

Faced with the actors incarnating a role of traditional cinema, and the "non-professional" actors of neorealist cinema, or Bresson's models, Rivette seems to choose a different path, choosing his actors clearly for their own personality and showing them in the least manipulative possible. That is why we intuit that there is a lot of improvisation, that they work on minimal plot lines.

The two leads are magnificent, especially Bulle Ogier. Little more is required of the rest of the cast than to appear natural.

One of Rivette's great films, with the director's characteristic treatment of time (some would call it unbearably slow), but without the fantasy element that Rivette will include in almost all of his other films, more along the lines of La belle noiseuse than in that of Celine et Julie vont en bateau.

L'Amour Fou (translates literally to Crazy Love) probably is one of the most harrowing, unique, slightly (no, very much so) deranged, special and brilliantly shot in 16mm/35mm black and white relationship dramas of its or any era that has slivers of surrealism and dream-like beats but is largely drenched in a realistic approach to the cinematography and staging and that makes it all the more affecting.... And at the same time it is hard not to think this really could have been a 3 hour or even 3 1/2 hour or so film instead of 4 and a 1/2. To put it another way, sometimes when you're full from a meal and your friend keeps making you eat, you're going to barely be able to keep your belt from breaking off your body in a clump, if you take my meaning.

And I get it. I really, really do, please dont @ me; I comprehend that the length is a major part of the point, that we need to see the grind day by night by day how this relationship deteriorates so completely that when they somehow are happy again in the latter part it isnt any kind of healthy joy, on the contrary it is the kind of apocalyptic-level of being on Cloud Nine that feels like being on a drug (and the come-down will be that much more emotionally fraught).

Maybe there weren't the words for it at the time too, but the nature of the characters, who are mood swinging to the sky and crashing to the ground again, speaks to what one might describe as BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) or even like a chronicle of Bi-Polar disorder through and through and it's the fact that it's just... there and that honesty makes it compelling (one scene has Sebastien's assistant comment he should talk to someone; insert 'Men will direct agonizing Greek tragedy rather than go to Therapy' joke here).

So, Rivette puts the audience through the many productive and awkward and emotionally violent and turbulent and sorrowful and joyful days and nights where we gotta be with this couple and see the repitition and staging this play with these actors (some of who, I'm glad we are shown, are getting visibly tired and fed up with the moody director), and how that starts to send him into a downward spiral and so on. And there are stretches where this hits your heart and drops your jaw and when they tear apart that one wall it's darkly funny. But my goodness, this is so much cinema - and when I can point to specifics that could be cut (the sub plot with buying/not buying a dog), that's a problem.

Extra kudos has to go to the 2 lead actors, particularly Ogier (a Rivette regular and from Bunuel's Discreet Charm) who digs so deep into her pain to bring out what we see on the screen (or can pretend better than anyone from the 60s in France), who definitely were a main reason for keeping me in my seat until the ending.... even though the male lead Kalfon looks distractingly like a young Steve Martin to the point where I sometimes wondered if he would just go into a rendition of being a dentist and get over with. 8.5/10.

4 hours+ to tell a dull story! Chain smoking french men and women rehearsing for Greek play, and some weak-ass relationship drama on the side. That's it!!! I started fast forwarding after 40 minutes, and I can believe I actually endured that much. A complete waste of time, so don't bother!

I saw this back when it was released in Paris. In those days I had only begun to watch films seriously so I didn't have much experience concerning when to leave or when I was allowed to get bored. I stayed through the whole thing - all three hours plus - and came out genuinely perplexed. It was a talkathon, no question about that, and at times it seemed to me that the actors were just making things up as they went along, just treading dramatic water as it were. Although not much of anything happened or was even said, the characters discussed the nothingness to the point of madness, I thought. It seemed at the time to be a huge joke on the audience. The director did in fact make a commercially viable film years late with "Celine et Julie...", still quite long - to the point of undermining itself - but not as obnoxiously obsessed with its "meaning" or "significance". There are in fact many good French films out there that aren't endurance contests as I subsequently found out.

Curtis Stotlar