Jacques Rivette/France/2003; R4
Accent/RS, $24.95 | Reviewed by Brannavan Gnanalingam

FRENCH New Wave director Jacque Rivette and Emmanuelle Beart collaborated on one of the great films of the 1990s, La Belle Noiseuse. In The Story of Marie and Julien, they re-unite, and create a film that will cause the purists to sit back and consider for days what went on, and cause the casual viewer frustration and annoyance.

Rivette has been one of the great French directors. His classic films Céline et Julie vont en Bateau and La Belle Noiseuse dissect the concept of cinema, fiction and the artistic process. La Belle Noiseuse in particular focuses on the author – a didactic, dictatorial torturer full of self-doubt and frustration. Céline et Julie explores the ideas of narrative, the construction of narrative, performance and their relationships to an audience.

It is possible to read this film in a similar way, especially given Rivette’s influential support of the auteur theory in the 50s and the 60s. In particular, this film does not follow any sort of internal logic. If you were to look for logic, you’d find Marie and Julien rather annoying and slow. And, given the fact that Céline et Julie and La Belle Noiseuse can be enjoyed superficially too, perhaps Marie and Julien won’t go down as one of his greatest. This plot ostensibly follows Julien, an antique clock restorer who is blackmailing an antiques dealer, Madame X. He runs into an old flame, Marie, after dreaming of being re-united with her. They agree to meet up, and then embark on a passionate relationship. As a result, the film bears a strong similarity to Hitchcock in creating a rather meaningless “plot” to explore other ideas (except you don’t realise that with Hitchcock, because Hitchcock’s plots are generally interesting enough).

The film may be read as a deconstruction of cinema. The illusion of reality beneath fiction is a debate that has existed throughout the history of cinema – is what we see an “objective truth” (those people who look for narrative logic generally assume this to be the case), or is a subjective reconstruction following some different logic from what we expect or understand? The film continually undermines causality and logic – are we seeing dreams, digressions, fantasies or “real-life”? Where do the antique clocks come from? Why is he blackmailing Madame X? Why is she called Madame X? Who were their former lovers? Etc. etc. By creating a basic logic and then breaking it up, Rivette is continuing his decades-long exploration on the nature of fiction. It’s deep philosophical stuff, and certainly you would benefit from either an intimate knowledge of Rivette’s stuff, or an understanding of the history of film criticism (particularly Bazin and the Cahiers du Cinéma crew). Otherwise, you’ll find this boring, infuriating stuff.


THE DVD comes with trailers of a number of wonderful films being put out by Accent. And while the trailers aren’t the most exciting, the thought of Bresson, Bergman and Rohmer being released by a major distributor should be cause for celebration.