L'Amour fou (1969)
Directed by Jacques Rivette

Film Review

The interrelationship between life and art is an idea that has inspired many filmmakers, but few have made it more central to their oeuvre than Jacques Rivette.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the two boldly experimental works that Rivette made near the start of his career, L'Amour fou (1969) and Out 1: Noli me tangere (1971), which intercut slices of real life with rehearsals for stage plays in a way that makes the connection between life and art not only self-evident but also essential. The length of these two films (the first runs to fours hours, the second to just over twelve) means that neither has received the exposure that Rivette's other films have enjoyed and which they richly deserve.  Even Rivette's re-edit of the second film, Out 1 : Spectre (1972), which comes in at a more digestible four hours, is hard to come by.  This is indeed unfortunate, as no one can gain a full appreciation of Jacques Rivette's art without watching these two films - arguably the most important works of the French New Wave.

L'Amour fou is essentially a polished, slimmed down reworking of Rivette's first film, Paris nous appartient (1961), which was made on a virtually non-existent budget over a three year period and, poorly promoted, failed to find an audience.  After this, Rivette made a more conventional film, La Religieuse (1966), based on a novel by Diderot, but this created such a storm of controversy that for a while it was banned in France.   It wasn't the most auspicious start to any filmmaking career and for the next few years Rivette occupied himself with a profile of the legendary film director Jean Renoir in the French television series Cinéastes de notre temps.  It was through his interviews with Renoir that Rivette gained some dramatic new insights into the art of filmmaking that would inspire him greatly on his next film, L'Amour fou.

There were two other important influences for this film - the work of the avant-garde theatre director Marc'O and the cinéma vérité style of documentary filmmaking that was being pioneered by Jean Rouch, on such films as Chronique d'un été (1961).  For the leading roles in L'Amour fou - a theatre director Sébastien (closely modelled on Marc'O) and his wife Claire - Rivette chose the two leading members of Marc'O's theatre company, Jean-Pierre Kalfon and Bulle Ogier, neither of whom had had much film experience before this.  The producer of Rivette's Renoir documentaries, André S. Labarthe, was roped in to play the television director filming the rehearsals of the play within the film.

Both Kalfon and Labarthe were given a free hand to develop their characters, which were basically extensions of themselves (Kalfon had directed stage plays prior to this).  As a result, these two had a significant creative input into the film, as did Ogier, who improvised many of her scenes.  Here revealing herself to be an exceptional talent, Ogier proved to be a gift for auteur filmmakers.  In addition to Rivette, with whom she worked on several other films, including Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974), Duelle (une quarantaine) (1976) and Le Pont du Nord (1981), she also lent her talents to Marguerite Duras, Barbet Schroeder and Alain Tanner.

That L'Amour fou is a collaborative effort shows in its unapologetically jagged feel and reluctance to cohere into a nicely homogeneous piece of cinema.  The convention that films should have a beginning, a middle and an end, and must proceed thuswise in a steady, logical manner, is one that Rivette totally disregards as he constructs a Russian Doll kind of narrative that reflects and references itself endlessly, before finally looping round on itself.  Scenes mirror other scenes, and within some scenes there is a striking mirror-effect (sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious), all creating the impression that human beings are governed by simple rules that inevitably result in repeated patterns of behaviour.  The fact that Racine's play so closely mirrors the experiences of the film's protagonists is not because life is bound to imitate art, but because human nature is so resistant to change across the centuries.
 
More perplexingly, there is no beginning or end to this film - just a never-ending spiral from you can never escape.  The last shot of the film - a close-up on a blank stage with the sound of a baby crying - is the exact same one with which it begins, so you could, if you wished, play the film on a continuous loop.  If you were to watch the film several times over (assuming you have a dozen or so hours to spare - try it the next time you are on a longhaul flight) you'll be surprised how differently it appears on each pass of the loop.  Each time you watch the film, it seems to change, altered by your (imperfect) recollection of the previous viewing.  Things shift in subtle and surprising ways - this is L'Amour fou's most unsettling characteristic.

And this is essentially what the film is about - our inability to possess for ourselves any kind of consistent objective reality.  Because we can only see things from one perspective at any time, because what we see is shaped by our inadequate senses and unpredictable state of mind, inevitably the picture that ends up in our heads and gets recorded (with even more imperfections) in our memories  is a biased, distorted view of reality.  You might call it the Rashomon effect, after the film by Akira Kurosawa in which four people give wildly different accounts of the same event they witnessed.

In L'Amour fou, Rivette films a television crew that is filming rehearsals for a stage play that mirrors the disintegrating marriage of its director and his wife.  There are multiple realities at play here, all feeding off each other, each forming a part of a complete picture that never quite comes into focus, no matter how many times you watch the film.  Rivette, Labarthe and Kalfon form a kind of three-sided mirror, each a dedicated director who hopes to find his own idea of truth through his art.  Labarthe's documentary inserts - shot using a handheld camera on 16mm film - have that '60s cinéma vérité quality that now looks quaintly humorous, and (oddly) these give a greater sense of reality to what Rivette himself shoots (on standard 35mm film) - mostly long static shots, sometimes with the camera slowly tracking back and forth, more often with the camera fixed on his actors.

It isn't just the difference in film quality that sets Larthe's footage apart from Rivette's.  With his frenetic use of zooms and camera motion, Larthe is actively engaged in imposing his identity on the film; he interacts directly with the people he is filming, often in a sly, conspiratorial manner.  By contrast, Rivette looks more like a disinterested observer, looking on from a distance and allowing his actors to express themselves as they choose, without being directly led.  Both film directors are shaping reality and presenting it in a way that suits him best - and the same applies to Kalfon, who, as the theatre director, must choose how Racine's play is to be interpreted.  As these three very different individuals all have their go at turning life into art, we see the process happening in reverse - art becoming life through its dramatic impact on the two principal characters.

With hindsight, Sébastien would have known better than to have cast his wife as Hermione in a play in which he takes the role of Pyrrhus.  In Racine's play, Hermione pines with an unrequited love for Pyrrhus, but he is passionately in love with another woman, the Trojan captive Andromaque.  When Claire walks away from the play and Sébastien replaces her with his ex-lover Marta, her identification with Hermione makes it inevitable that she will suspect her husband of infidelity.

As the marriage slowly crumbles before our eyes, both characters withdraw in on themselves - Sébastien becomes ever more absorbed in his work, Claire seals herself in her apartment and does weird things with a tape recorder before going off on a mad quest around Paris to find a sad-looking dog with which she apparently shares a likeness.  (Is this normal behaviour for a married woman when her husband says she looks like a dog?)  Sébastien remains Monsieur Insouciant as his other half threatens to blind him with a hat pin and shoot him with his conveniently loaded gun, before taking a razor blade to herself.

In the second half of the film, Claire and Sébastien's positions are suddenly reversed once the gun-toting wife has finally accepted the reality of their predicament.  Sébastien reacts to his wife's announcement that their marriage is over like a man who has suddenly had a bucket of ice-cold water tipped over him.  His mental disintegration is as extreme as Claire's, only played at a far greater speed.  Dumbfounded, he picks up a razor and starts slicing all the clothes he is wearing to ribbons.  It is a pathetic spectacle of self-abasement, more comic than tragic, but it allows Claire to show that she is now the reasonable one.  She manages to stop Sébastien from cutting up his entire wardrobe and the couple arrive at a fragile truce.

Now seemingly convinced they are the ideal married couple again, Sébastien and Claire take an impromptu holiday in their apartment, with they proceed to vandalise in every conceivable way.  They daub crude pictures on the walls, tear down the wall-paper, demolish a door and then smash a television set with an axe - it's a Godardian cathartic surge that allows the repressed inner violence to escape without anyone ending up on a mortuary slab.  No sooner are they back in their old routine than Sébastien receives a phone call telling him that Claire has left him for good.  He then walks about a desolate Paris, looking like a man whose whole world has collapsed in on him.  This is the point at which you thank your lucky stars he hadn't tried to stage a production of Titus Andronicus.  Heaven knows how that would have ended.

With Sébastien being such a self-absorbed narcissist and Claire being a closet psychopath they were likely to separate at some point, but the former's decision to stage Andromaque with his wife in the role of Hermione made this outcome a certainty.  What is ironic is that whilst Sébastien becomes obsessed that the play should represent life as a faithfully as possible, Claire ends up being hell-bent on turning both of their lives into a Greek tragedy.  In forcing art to be like life, and life to be like art, the play and the marriage end disastrously.  But where do the boundaries between art and life lie, and can we even be sure that they exist?  As you finally stagger out of this labyrinthine hall of mirrors, you can't help wondering whether art and life are just two facets of a more complete fiction that is hidden from us, reflections of a deeper truth in some warped celestial looking glass.

Film Synopsis

To those who know them, Sébastien and Claire are the model of the perfectly happy married couple.  But as they rehearse a stage production of Racine's play Andromaque, the fault lines in their marriage are already starting to show.  Sébastien's rigorous direction and the unwelcome presence of a television film crew filming the rehearsals drive Claire to abandon the play.  Sébastien promptly gives her role, Hermione, to his former mistress, Marta.  Because Sébastien is also playing the part of Pyrrhus (Hermione's betrothed in the play), Claire imagines he is being unfaithful to her.  As the couple become increasingly estranged, Sébastien grows ever absorbed in his work and neglects his wife, who makes herself a prisoner in her own apartment.  Sébastien appears unconcerned by his wife's irrational behaviour, which leads her to attempt suicide; indeed, he finds her replacement with Marta in his play was providential, as it opens up artistic possibilities that he had not considered.  As the marriage deteriorates further Sébastien finally wakes up to truth that Claire may be about to leave him for good.  The shock is more than he can bear...