Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003) - film review

Julien is a middle-aged clock repairman who lives alone in a big house with only his cat for company.  He has acquired some items which threaten a businesswoman, Madame X, who trades in fake fabrics, and begins to blackmail her.  Coincidentally, it is at this time that he renews an acquaintance with a young woman, Marie, with whom he had a brief affair a year ago.  After the death of her boyfriend, Marie is alone and appears desperate for Julien’s company.  Moving into Julien’s house, Marie soon manages to rekindle their former passion.  But then Julien begins to notice something strange about Marie.  When she cuts herself, she does not bleed; from time to time, she drifts into a trance-like state; and she seems obsessed with furnishing a small room at the top of his house.  Ironically, Madame X holds the key to this mystery…

Histoire de Marie et Julien is a marked contrast to Jacques Rivette’s previous feature, Va savoir (2000), and represents a kind of return to the darker, more abstract film of the director’s past.  Essentially, the film is a ghost story, but one in which the supernatural elements are gradually, very subtly, bled into our field of view.  Everything we see appears not just plausible but tacitly real, even though reason tells us it must be fantasy.  View films have blurred the distinction between reality and unreality as effectively as this one, and for that reason alone it should be regarded as one of Jacques Rivette’s most significant achievements.

The film’s prologue presages what is to come – a conventional scene from a romantic drama ends abruptly with a horror twist, only to be dismissed as a dream sequence.  We are then diverted by the thriller sub-plot involving the enigmatic Madame X before ending up in the film’s central story strand – the rebirth of the affair between Julien and Marie.  For the next thirty minutes or so, as Rivette languorously explores the relationship of the two characters (with some pretty explicit and beautifully choreographed love scenes), it looks as if we are in a conventional, typically French romantic drama.  Wrong again.  Little by little, the fantasy elements in the plot emerge and what Rivitte ultimately delivers is not a familiar love story but something much more unusual, and strangely far more fulfilling.  This is a tale in which the carnal is subsumed by the spiritual, a film that momentarily widens our perspective, or at least causes us to ponder on our existence and what may lie beyond the curtain that retains us in this thing we call life.

At first sight, it would appear improbable that a director of Rivette’s reputation would even consider making a film with a fantasy component, but then even a cursory examination of his filmography points out that this is no ordinary directory and a number of his films do have a surrealist dimension – for example, Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974).  The rigorous naturalism that most defines Rivette’s cinema allows the director to push the boundary more effectively than a director who has a reputation for artifice and whimsy, and makes it easier for an audience to accept what his camera is portraying, even if what we see is beyond our experience or imagination. Perhaps the only other film director who had this talent for making the fantastic appear so believable and relevant was Jean Cocteau, and certain elements of Histoire de Marie et Julien appear to have been influenced by Cocteau’s unique contribution to cinema.

This film began its life back in 1975, and was intended to be one of four films Rivette planned to make under the umbrella title Scènes de la Vie Parallele.  Although two of the films were completed, two were abandoned, and one of these was the film Marie et Julien, which was to have starred Leslie Caron and Albert Finney.  Twenty-eight years on, Rivette resurrected the central themes of Marie et Julien, effectively re-writing the script from scratch because he was unable to make any sense of the shorthand notes that he had written with Claire Denis.

For this “born again” version of Marie et Julien, Rivette had only one actress in mind for the part of Marie – Emmanuelle Béart.  This popular and talented actress had famously worked with the director twelve years before on his masterful meditation on the creative process, La Belle noiseuse (1991).   That film largely contributed to the young Béart’s reputation and subsequent success, which she more than repays with another extraordinary performance – possibly her best to date – in Histoire de Marie et Julien.  Credit should also go to her co-stars: Jerzy Radziwilowicz is perfect as the taciturn, slightly menacing Julien, whilst Anne Brochet gives a haunting performance as the strange, almost ethereal, Madame X.  However, at the end of the day, this film belongs to Béart (even if she is – occasionally – out-staged an aspiring thespian feline).  Béart’s ability to engage with an audience and arouse genuine emotion pays dividends and makes this, Rivette’s darkest, most mysterious film, both a compelling human drama and a sensually composed work of art.

© James Travers 2005


Jacques Rivette’s films delight in making connections with other movies. Histoire de Marie et Julien, for instance, clearly sparks a contrapuntal playing with Hitchcock’s Vertigo.   In the latter, the hero falls in love with an irretrievable dead woman.  In the former, a female revenant falls prey to a man whom she hopes to escape by suicide but ends up remaining in this world through the effect of mutual love. 

The story makes its way into the genre of horror pictures, through deceitful hints at Bluebeard manoeuvring.  At the beginning, the spectator is led to be suspicious over the intentions of the clocksmith (Jerzy Radziwilovicz), who alludes to himself as a butcher and exhibits his talent as blackmailer.   He is a man dedicated to repairing old clocks and to restoring their exact rhythm but, ironically, he would have to confront two individuals who will test his own time-keeping skills.  First there is the errant Marie (Emmanuelle Béart), whose strange behaviour makes us query the chronology of events.  Then there is the enigmatic blackmail victim who appears at unexpected moments and who provides the key to the mystery.

The slow movement of the camera, the sentences that appear to have a delayed meaning, the use of strong reds and blues in many scenes, all contribute to the mysterious atmosphere of this haunting film.  The cheerful popular song that accompanies the credits at the end, Our Day Will Come, is a final amazing turn of the screw that seems to parody the whole movie.

© Adam Gai (Israel) 2010

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?