Film Review
Watching Andrei Tarkovsky's
Stalker and Jacques Rivette's
Merry-Go-Round back-to-back (as one
occasionally does whilst contemplating the meaningless of existence
and the paucity of good films these days) it is
hard not to be struck by the eerie, accidental
similarity between the two films.
Made at almost exactly the same time, by two equally free-spirited auteurs (one an esteemed maverick of
Soviet cinema, the other a cherished relic of the French New Wave), the films
both depict a quest but they end up being something far more
profound. The most tangible similarity between these two films is
that they both had a fraught production and came very close to being
abandoned midway through filming. But whereas Tarkovsky's film is
now hailed as an unequivocal masterpiece, possibly the greatest film of
the Soviet era, Rivette's film is mostly overlooked and considered a
lesser work, even by the director's most ardent admirers. Only by
watching it straight after
Stalker
do you appreciate how great a film
Merry-Go-Round
is - although watching these two films in one sitting does take a
certain amount of stamina (not to mention caffeine).
Merry-Go-Round is certainly
not Rivette's most accessible film, but it has a quality (chaos
tempered by lunacy) that makes it weirdly compelling. Never one
to bother much with plot, Rivette starts out with the flimsiest of
storylines - a search for a missing girl who may or may not be alive
and a fortune that may or may not exist - and uses this as a pretext to
eavesdrop on the evolving relationship between two completely different
characters - an American drifter named Ben and a hard-to-pin-down
French girl named Léo. Given that most of the film was
improvised, it's hardly surprising that the plot quickly becomes
unfathomable, with secondary characters appearing and disappearing at
the drop of a hat, contradicting or confusing much of what has gone
before. Much as we may wish it, none of the pieces fit together,
but that doesn't stop us trying to make a picture out of them. As
in Tarkovsky's film, we are compelled to try to make sense of something
that inherently has no sense, and in doing so we learn something about
ourselves.
This was the film that Rivette had most difficulty with. He was
obliged to make it to conclude a contractual agreement with the backers
of
Scènes de la vie
parallèle, a series of four films that he was unable to
complete. Rivette had completed the first two films -
Duelle (1976) and
Noroît (1976) - and was just
a few days into filming the third -
Marie
et Julien - when he succumbed to a nervous breakdown. It
was a year before he could begin work on his next film,
Merry-Go-Round, and this would
consume over two years of his life. It all began when the actress
Maria Schneider contacted Rivette and asked if he would be interested
in making a film with her and Joe Dallessandro, with whom she was
friendly at the time. The lure of working with two of the biggest
sub-culture icons of the 1970s (one made famous by Bernardo
Bertolucci's
Last Tango in Paris, the other
a star of Andy Warhol's films) must have been too strong to resist, so
Rivette accepted Schneider's offer, only to regret it once filming got
underway.
The strain of Rivette's improvisational approach to filmmaking
doubtless hastened the deteriorating relationship between Schneider and
Dallessandro, and the lead actors soon became antagonistic towards one
another. Both suffering from chronic ill health, Rivette and
Schneider were ready to walk away from the project but were persuaded
to stay the course by the cast and crew. In the end, Schneider
had to call it a day and some of her scenes (the cutaway sequences
depicting Léo pursuing Ben in the woods) were filmed with
another actress, Hermine Karagheuz, who had appeared in Rivette's
earlier film
Out 1 (1971). The film's
chaotic production and off-screen battles are reflected in what finally
ended up on the screen, after two years of exquisite hell.
Given what Rivette and his cast had to go through to finish the film,
it's amazing that
Merry-Go-Round
stands up as well as it does, and it's hard to fathom why, on its first
release, the critics were so dismissive of it. The film serves as
a bridge between the surreal oddity that is
Céline et Julie vont en bateau
(1974) and the strange metaphysical thriller
Le Pont du Nord (1981) - indeed,
together these three films form a triptych that is much more than the
sum of its parts.
Merry-Go-Round
is the most ambiguous of the three films, and the most
challenging. Woven into the main narrative, in which long-haired
babe magnet Ben fails to hit it off with aloof French girl Léo
as they take part in a bizarre treasure hunt, are increasingly bizarre
cutaways in which one of the protagonists is mercilessly hunted across
countryside by the other. In one of these, Léo sends a
pack of wild dogs after Ben; in another, Ben is pursued by a knight in
shining armour; later, Léo is attacked by snakes on a stretch of
beach. And, just to make things even weirder, the narrative
occasionally breaks off altogether to show us two musicians -
bass-player Barre Phillips and clarinettist John Surman - improvising
the film's soundtrack.
You expect, at some point, that all these disparate elements will
magically come together and create a satisfying whole, leaving you with
the comforting feeling you get once you have worked your way to the end
of a murder mystery novel. Of course, this being a Jacques
Rivette film, you'd have to be mad to wish for such a thing. Far
from being given a nice tidy resolution, we are left in a state of
total perplexment, unsure which part (if any) of what we have seen is
real, and what lies in the realm of the imagination. Only the
final sequence - the most enigmatic and most perfect ending of any of
Rivette's films - feels real. The rest is illusion, an excursion
into that strange parallel existence that we visit only in our
dreams. Is it so easy to tell dreams and reality apart in real
life?
Merry-Go-Round
has you wondering...
© James Travers 2015
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Next Jacques Rivette film:
La Bande des quatre (1988)