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.
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.