In his best-known film, Celine and Julie Vont a Bateau/Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), Jacques Rivette had suggested that one can transform the ways in which life is narrated. Jumping in at the deep end of a mystery involving déjà vu, magic spells and secret houses, Celine and Julie gradually discover that they can change the content of what’s initially experienced as unalterable hallucination or dream, and thus in turn redeem time, history and a narrative that orients towards female victimhood (the murder of a young girl). The film ends with a gentle trip down the river, the protagonists, accompanied by the girl they’ve rescued from the clutches of time and death, forming a kind of substitute family of women. Celine was made the year of President Valéry Giscard D’Estaing’s first election, the year after the 1973 energy crisis, the end of the ‘Trentes Glorieuses’, the beginning of a regime of austerity and unemployment. Wearied by the succeeding half-decade, Le Pont presents no child to rescue, no boating trip or shaggy-dog story, but a bridge which, as in the children’s song from which the film drew its inspiration, selfish children will fall, in a kind of divine punishment dished out by a moralistic universe. (“The bridge collapsed and they drowned / See the fate of obstinate children”).
Protagonists Marie (Bulle Ogier) and Baptiste (her daughter, Pascale) first meet when Marie, absent-mindedly absorbed in her little red notebook—a joking nod to the radicalism of the ’68 generation (“see you at Mao”), rendered now pure introspection—steps out into the road in front of Baptiste, causing the latter to crash her moped and furiously slash a wire to quieten the out-of-control vehicle, still spinning wildly on the road. Running into each other twice more, Baptiste insists that she and Marie team up—for while meeting once or even twice might be chance or accident, three times is fate. Seeking to reuinite with her lover Julien (Pierre Clémenti) after spending a year in prison, Marie reluctantly and then more willingly teams up with Baptiste after Julien mysteriously disappears to undertake a task that will take him three days—after which, he promises, they can continue their love relationship. Ground down by prison, Marie tells Baptiste that she’s now committed to love as the guarantor of future happiness and security, but, as the film unfolds, this love affair is revealed to be caught up in more sinister machinations. Before their meeting, Baptiste has repeatedly revved up the moped as if threatening to confront a man who, apparently quite innocently prepares to set off on a motorbike being fixed at the side of the road. This man will reveal himself to be—perhaps—the principal antagonist in a vaguely-defined conspiracy operating through figures Baptise calls ‘Maxes’: spies or ‘guards’ who follow their victims, always in disguise, so many of them overrunning the city that “sometimes they kill each other”. After Baptiste exchanges Julien’s valise with a substitute, ruining an exchange involving large amounts of money: guns begin to be drawn, bodies to be found, threats to be made. The conspiracy centres principally on information—the valise contains maps, newspaper cuttings, obscure symbols—in the manner of the MacGuffin. We never really decipher what this information might mean, though we do discover that its consequences can be deadly. The protagonists’ quest to follow the mysterious diagrams they find drawn over maps of Paris, and approximating to the centuries-old children’s ‘Game of the Goose’, ends with Julien shooting Marie on the titular bridge, and Baptiste preparing to do battle with the chief ‘Max’ (Jean-François Stévenin)—a battle that then breaks through the fourth wall into a moment of levity that at once belies the drama of what we’ve just seen and heightens its lack of real resolution.
The information that Marie and Baptiste find in the valise reads as a kind of anatomy of the preceding decade: newspaper clippings, underlined in mysterious red and with arcane annotations covering everything from murder cases to bank robberies, political assassinations to corruption scandals, with Jacques Mesrine, whose name appears several times, as index of this ambiguity—a would-be Robin Hood who had been a member of the far-right OAS, in the ’70s declared Public Enemy no.1, whose death—denounced by some as extra-judicial execution on the part of the police force—had been celebrated by President D’Estaing. Marie hints that, Patty-Hearst like, she was manipulated into taking part in a series of bank robberies by those who argued that the real thieves were the banks themselves, but ideology, as with Mesrine, seems fluid here—whether the various deadly games in the film are taken on the part of the State, criminal organisations, or in the mercenary shadow world between the two. (Indeed, at one point, Stévenin suddenly speaks to Marie in German, raising the possibility of a clandestine network of former Nazis, material for a 1970s paranoiac-thriller of the ‘Marathon Man’ variety).
Gangsters, property developers, politicians: against this murky political world—involvement in which seems to have led to her time in prison—Marie clings to the promises of heterosexual romance, reuniting with Julien and telling Baptiste that she’s now resolved to devote herself to love—despite the fact that, as she admits, they’d been together only a week before she was arrested, and despite the hint that it was a romantic relationship which led to her crimes in the first place. Ultimately, it’s through Julien that Marie meets her fate, slain on the titular bridge. The lovers here take the titles of Rivette’s at the time-abandoned Marie and Julien project. A story of love and death inspired by the story of a woman who’d committee suicide, the film had led Rivette to a nervous breakdown (it would later be revived in the 1990s as a kind of ghost story). Yet this is hardly genuine amour fou (and all the gendered violence that the associated legal definition of the crime passionnel has historically covered), even if, early in the film, Rivette deploys the iconic romantic fatalism of Piazzola’s ‘Libertango’, which he described as “somewhere between a brothel and the church”.
Rather, it’s the relationship between Marie and Baptiste that takes centre stage: two women who traverse the city without the ‘guidance’ of a man, their relationship serving challenge to existing orders—whether it’s in the patriarchal expectations of a city of (male) gazes, or the double-bind between the routinised enclosure of the workplace or the prison (the workhouse itself, that fusion of the two characteristic of an earlier era, having given way to a more ‘civilised’ separation) and the ‘rootless’ wandering of the unemployed taken as such a threat by the State. Baptiste, in her leather jacket, anticipates a kind of wider-eyed, more lively version of Agnes Varda’s ‘vagabond’ a few years later, and she and Marie stand in for those who, ‘sans toit ni loi’ (without roof or law, the French title to Varda’s film) occupy space as transitory and transient inhabitants—not as romanticised images of movement, nor as pitiable images of suffering, nor as moralistic images of condemnation, nor as peripheral concern, but as central social fact. (After all, as Foucault suggested, it’s in the control of surplus populations, and in the increased surveillance function of the disciplinary apparatus, that the modern European state began to develop its characteristic forms.)
Interviewing Rivette about the film, Marguerite Duras was wholly admiring of the gendered mobility of the film’s protagonists, of its refiguring of the city through perpetual movement, at once liberation and prison: “We have never seen women like this out in the open air, without any attachment, without identity, a film that runs along like a river...”) In some ways, the opening sequences recall the endless motion of Marguerite Duras’ late ’70s short films (Aurelia Steiner, Les Mains Negatives, Le Navire Night, Cesaree), shot in and around Paris at its edges, at dusk or dawn, with their overlaid narrations of desire, of missed connections, and of concealed historical trauma. This movement is also a kind of literal going round in circles. Riding endlessly round the square, shaking her fist at the stone lions, Baptiste invokes the Rastafarian/Hebrew condemnation of ‘Babylon’ in a kind of Quixotic windmill-tilting, right before her first encounter with Marie knocks her off her moped and renders her warrior’s horse useless.
Thereafter, Baptiste is on foot. For her part, Marie, rendered claustrophobic by her time in prison, refuses to go indoors; we first see her taking a lift in the back of an open-topped truck, then ordering a croissant from the door of a cafe and asking it to be brought outside; she runs across the crowded roundabout of the Arc de Triomphe, risking death from waves of cars, rather than take the pedestrian subway. As a result, she and Baptiste wander on the peripheries, tracing a route round the city that’s not so much circuitous as an unpredictable zig-zag, crossing, re-crossing, doubling back along railroad tracks, reservoirs, building sites, footbridges, endless steps in Escher-like matching shot patterns (see the extremely detailed shot analysis here). But rather than a liberated movement in the mode of the flânuer or the dérive, such movement feels expressive of a relation to space characterised by loneliness and a lack of security. “You’re the first person I’ve met [in this city]”, Baptiste tells Marie. Much of the latter portion of the film takes place in the largely deserted wastelands that develop as a consequence of the deals between property developers, city officials; half-ruined buildings, a graveyard so overgrown that the graves only become visible after a protagonist literally stumbles across them (along with a dead body), a church apparently in the middle of nowhere, missing buildings knocked down to make way for the new that’s permanently promised and never quite arrives.
Against this—the city as wasteland or trap—Rivette (and DP William Lubtchansky) juxtaposes Marie and Baptiste’s game-playing with the imaginative transformations rendered by cinema itself. After Marie rescues Baptiste from the giant spider’s web in which she’s been trapped by a ‘Max’, the camera moves across a set of new, multi-coloured but already-dilapidated apartment blocks rising like distorted fairytale castles from the surrounding ruins of one of the city’s many new ‘(re)development’ sites: two forms of the sublime, the ridiculous, and the pragmatic indexing the realities of urban property rights and the exclusions their surfaces and edifices both exacerbate and deny. This shot encapsulates the film’s methodology—to relentlessly draw attention to its own limited technical means (at various points we see the actors buy or steal props used in subsequent scenes) whilst also combining them with a kind of whimsical enchantment. Based on improvisation and delivered with a technical minimum of means, film is refigured as play, or play-acting: a child-like assembly and re-assembly of stock figures, poses and props, harking back to the simplified repetition of generic conventions in early film (as when an actor puts their head on a railroad line to listen for approaching trains), or to the replaying of film clichés in children’s games. And while Baptise and Marie make little direct reference to cinema, film posters appear throughout—whether as illusion of space and freedom (our protagonists spend the night in the cinema watching 1956 western The Big Country (Les Grandes Espaces)—or as indication of gendered oppression—when Marie suffers an anxiety attack aboard a train, Baptiste sits her down beneath a poster for the slasher movie ‘The Silent Scream’ (rendered in French as ‘The Silence that Kills’), and at another point we glimpse the poster for Clouzot’s strange piece of misplaced psychedelia about voyeurism, domination and attraction to imprisonment, La Prisonniere. Baptiste associates the visual forms of mass media—whether cinema or advertisements—as menacing forces. Obsessed with surveillance, slashing at the eyes on billboards (whether a Kurosawa film or an advert for glasses)— she tells Marie that “eyes are everywhere”. Indeed, what’s striking about the film in contrast to Celine and Julie is that, for all the games and play-acting seen here, the mood of the film is suffused by a fatalism and low-level paranoia with no real outlet or end in sight. Whereas Celine and Julie negotiate their way into an apparent magical transformation of reality, the protagonists’ role-playing remains trapped within the terms of shadowy male domination it attempts to resist. As Serge Daney put it: “Facing a scenario whose terms are set, more or less hypocritically, by men (stories of secret societies, scavenger hunts, traps), the women respond by inventing an even more aleatory way of acting! A game unto themselves, then a game between themselves – beyond all hope, parodic, and excessive.”
Breaking the fourth wall in the final scene opens the film up to a playfulness it’s hitherto—despite being largely about game-playing—managed to largely avoid. But it also suggests a further falling into the abyss of indecipherable meaning, doubling, switching and artifice that is as much index of powerlessness as tool of protection. Baptiste has rehearsed for this fight every morning—removing her jacket (“my armour”, as she tells Marie) in an activity between self-defense, aesthetic form and obsessive-compulsive ritual, in which respect for opponents (the closing bow which Marie returns with a sardonic affection) suggests a formalised naivety out of place in the present moment. The inadequacy of the form is suggested in the final ‘battle’, in which the ‘Max’ instructs her: “Don’t forget your enemy is imaginary”. Baptiste’s karate fight is, in fact, a game played for the cameras operated by men.
Asked about the film’s perspective, Rivette told Daney and Jean Narboni in 1981: “It’s never the point of view of power, that’s for sure!” Rivette continues that he can’t show those in power because he can’t take them seriously. Yet this refusal to dignify those in power with representation also means that power’s operations themselves become numinous, in true Foucauldian fashion—the ‘Maxes’ are only the (possible) agents of power, its representatives or conduits, never those in charge. When Marie questions some of her stranger speculations on fate as modes of fantasy, Baptiste responds: “Real life is a reign of terror”. Referencing the formative campaign of state violence that both lies behind and is denied within the French republic, Baptiste extends such histories to the present, whilst alluding to the shadowy campaigns of extra-legal killings involving Mesrine, the Far Right, and the State itself. Ultimately, Marie and Baptiste are up against capitalism itself: the combination of chance and intent that drives a system based on a combination of apparent pragmatic naturalisation (capitalist realism) and the most fantastic of justifications for rationalised irrationalism, legally- and extra-legally enshrined inequality. Their game-playing serves as their defiance of the system, set up within the system’s own terms: a folie-a-deux which self-perpetuates through the very ties it establishes and cements—forms of solidarity and friendship. What enables Marie and Baptiste—at first—to survive within this environment—their paranoiac game-playing—is also what renders them vulnerable and ignorable: a corpse on the periphery, yet another missing person or unexplained death, yet another disappeared and wayward life.
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