Rassegna stampa di Jacques Rivette

EVEN in the heyday of the French New Wave, the cinematic revolution he helped foment, Jacques Rivette was known as a “cinéaste maudit.” The term, which translates as “accursed filmmaker,” is a double-edged compliment, accorded to those visionaries who have a tough time getting their movies produced and whose achievements tend to be devalued or misunderstood.
Among the major critics turned filmmakers of the New Wave, Mr. Rivette has always been pegged as the one who makes the most rarefied and least commercial movies. François Truffaut cultivated a populist humanism. Jean-Luc Godard matured from youth-culture rebel to oracular elder statesman. Claude Chabrol honed an interest in the mystery genre and a distaste for the bourgeoisie. Eric Rohmer specialized in miniaturist studies of romantic complication and spiritual crisis.
Mr. Rivette, who turns 80 next month, is harder to pin down. His films, like “Céline and Julie Go Boating,” “La Belle Noiseuse” and “Va Savoir,” traffic in the spectral and the ineffable. Their plots overflow with paranoid conspiracies and secret codes. The Paris of his movies is a life-size board game, a labyrinth of signs. Everything is connected, or, perhaps more alarming, nothing is. His pet themes can seem dauntingly abstract: the allure of the theater, the line between acting and being, the enigmatic process of artistic creation, the curious means by which fictions take their shapes or take on lives of their own.
Mr. Rivette was among the critics who initiated the practice of running lengthy filmmaker Q. and A.’s in the influential journal Cahiers du Cinéma, but he seldom speaks to the press these days. A reclusive figure even in his youth, he came across as shy and somewhat cagey in a recent interview at his producer’s office here. As he entered the room, he joked that he felt that he was about to take an exam.

Slight and soft-spoken, he also seemed self-conscious about his reticence, explaining that he was preoccupied with the writing of his next movie and reluctant to look back on the others. “I’m not sure this is the best time for me to give an interview,” he said. “I’m caught between films.”
His self-effacement partly explains why his career has often seemed to exist in the shadows. He has long had champions in the Anglophone world — the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum edited a book of interviews with Mr. Rivette in the 1970s, and David Thomson, in the 2002 edition of his Biographical Dictionary of Film, called Mr. Rivette “the most important filmmaker of the last 35 years” — but more than half of his films have never been properly released in the United States and remain unavailable on DVD.
Yet his work is not difficult as much as deeply and even magically mysterious. If there is a constant, it is the sense that narrative is a puzzle and performance is a game. With their marathon lengths — often three or four hours (the legendary “Out 1” lasts literally half a day) — they are ritualistic experiences that require a certain fortitude. His best films work on the viewer like a spell. Their principal illusion is the uncanny impression that the story is being conjured by the characters as we watch, or summoned into existence by the act of our watching.
On the surface Mr. Rivette’s latest film, “The Duchess of Langeais,” opening Friday in New York, is one his most conventional. (At 135 minutes it is also one of his shortest.) Based on an 1833 Balzac novel and set largely in the drawing rooms of Restoration-era Paris, it details the shifting dynamics of a duel-like courtship between an aristocratic coquette (Jeanne Balibar) and a Napoleonic general (Guillaume Depardieu).
Theatrical and literary texts abound in Mr. Rivette’s films. His characters, often stage actors, have rehearsed Shakespeare, Racine and Pirandello. In “Céline and Julie Go Boating” (1973), the heroines stumble on a haunted house where they encounter a Gothic melodrama, derived from a Henry James novella, playing out in an eternal loop. Mr. Rivette is less inclined to adapt these borrowed stories than to plant them within his own, leaving the fictions to cross-pollinate. Self-contained interpretations like “The Duchess of Langeais” are relatively rare.
Faithful as his new movie is to its source, Mr. Rivette declines to call it an adaptation. “I don’t like that word,” he said. “Adaptation implies the possibility that a film will be the equivalent or an illustration of a book.”
As an alternate term, he proposed “compression.” “I felt a little like César,” he said, referring to the French artist known for his scrap-iron sculptures. “In relation to a book that is so delicate, I’m coming along with my compactor and crushing it up.” The genesis of “The Duchess of Langeais” illustrates Mr. Rivette’s belief that the story, far from the raison d’être, is often simply the pretext for the film. The initial impulse this time was to make a movie with Ms. Balibar, the star of his 2001 ensemble comedy, “Va Savoir,” and Mr. Depardieu, who had appeared in a film he admired, Leos Carax’s “Pola X.” “The curiosity to find out what happens when two actors come together,” he said, is often a motivating factor.
He came up with an outline for a contemporary mystery called “Next Year in Paris.” When financing failed to materialize, he looked for an existing story to accommodate these two actors and for the third time in his career was drawn to Balzac. “The Duchess of Langeais” is the centerpiece of Balzac’s trilogy about a secret society, “The History of the Thirteen,” which Mr. Rivette had used as the jumping-off point for the conspiratorial web of “Out 1.” A Balzac story was also the inspiration for “La Belle Noiseuse,” his 1991 film about a painter and his muse.
Mr. Rivette discovered Balzac late in life, despite the urgings of an esteemed friend and colleague. “Rohmer told me in the ’50s that there are two novelists every filmmaker needs to read: Dostoyevsky and Balzac,” he said. “But I had a hard time with Balzac.” He had read almost no Balzac when he decided to use the “Thirteen” mythology as the linchpin for “Out 1” (though Mr. Rohmer has an amusing cameo as a Balzac scholar in that film).
For “The Duchess of Langeais” he endeavored to preserve “the essence of Balzac’s writing, the long, complex sentences,” he said.
With a finished script in place before shooting, the film was more premeditated than most of Mr. Rivette’s movies. But not everything was planned. “We had a precise text, but there was no choreography, no stage direction,” he said. Decisions about how a scene would be played and composed were made on the spot and — in keeping with Mr. Rivette’s longstanding philosophy — often entrusted to the actors. Since “L’Amour Fou” (1969), his seismic portrait of an imploding relationship, he has, to varying degrees, ceded control to his performers, who assume a genuinely collaborative role.
Ms. Balibar said that on Mr. Rivette’s shoots it often falls on one of the actors to be “the envoy of the director.” On “Va Savoir” it was Sergio Castellitto, who played the director of a theater troupe. On “The Duchess of Langeais,” she said, “I had that function because my character, at least at the start, is very much a director of her own story.”
Implicit in Mr. Rivette’s love of actors is an almost mystical view of their purpose. “You have to convince most directors they can trust you,” Ms. Balibar said. “But Jacques will actually say, ‘The actors know a lot more than I do about the film.’ ”
The beauty of Mr. Rivette’s philosophy, she added, is that it does not even require the actors to be in tune with it. “Guillaume was ill at ease with how we worked,” she said, “but it didn’t matter at all because I think Jacques’s idea of cinema is similar to installation in a way. There are some people in a room, and we’ll see what happens. You let the unconscious of the actors do the work.”
If Mr. Rivette has attained almost godhead status among cinephiles, it is not just for his movies but also because he himself has always been a model film buff. Like Truffaut, Mr. Godard and the other obsessive young Cahiers critics, he received his film education in the movie clubs and cinémathèques of Paris, and more than the others he kept up his voracious viewing after turning to filmmaking. In a 1998 interview with the French arts magazine Les Inrockuptibles, he weighed in on a broad swath of classic and contemporary films (mounting a defense of “Showgirls” that likely contributed to Paul Verhoeven’s critical rehabilitation).
Major events have been devoted to Mr. Rivette in London, New York and Paris in recent years, but he claims to dislike the notion of retrospectives and was unaware that the virtually never seen “Out 1” had recently surfaced abroad. (He seemed both bemused and pleased to learn that “Out 1,” which runs 12 ½ hours, had played to a sold-out audience in New York.) He has no plans to join Mr. Rohmer, who announced his retirement last year, but Mr. Rivette is not as engaged in film culture as he once was.
He rarely reads criticism — “it’s not fun anymore,” he said — and admits he is no longer compelled to keep up with new movies. “It should not be that every filmmaker makes the films you expect of them,” he said. Referring to last year’s “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” and “No Country for Old Men,” which opened in France to glowing reviews, he added: “The critics are delighted that they have the Tim Burton movie they hoped for and the Coen brothers movie they hoped for. It’s as if the filmmakers have come through on their contracts.”
Mr. Rivette is living proof that not all old masters are brand names. “I’d prefer to make nothing than make something that’s like my other films,” he said. With a wry smile, he added, “Unfortunately, you don’t always succeed.”
Da The New York Times, 17 Febbraio 2008

Una polverosa villa fuori città abitata da vecchi orologi rotti. Misteriose soffitte. Un traffico di opere d’arte. Un gatto bianco e nero con un nome alla Poe:
Nevermore. È un fantasma. Non è un horror: è La storia di Marie e Julien, 150 minuti di film realizzati da un maestro della Nouvelle Vague, Jacques Rivette (in sala dal 2 luglio). Cinema d’autore, anzi di uno degli autori più autori d’Europa. Quasi un cortometraggio per lui, abituato a non mettere mai la parola fine ai suoi film e a non lasciarsi limitare dai tempi standard. Duecentoquaranra minuti per La belle noiseuse (noi però l’abbiamo vista sforbiciata a 125); circa sei ore il ciclo su Giovanna d’Arco (anche qui ingiustificata versione breve per gli italiani); per non parlare dei suoi film che non siamo mai stati degni di vedere in sala tipo Out: noli me tangere, otto segmenti di circa un’ora e mezza l’uno.
Ma in questo film che grazie alla Mikado, non solo vedremo integro, ma anche in versione originale con sottotitoli), Rivette è cambiato. L’ascetico Rivette racconta una storia d’amour fou, totale e avvolgente. Amplessi compresi (tra i più belli apparsi sugli schermi cinematografici, secondo alcuni critici). Lui è Jerzy Radziwilowicz, un tempo Uomo di marmo di Wajda; ora invecchiato, severo, intenso e malinconico orologiaio. Lei, Emmanuelle Béart splendida e quasi senza trucco, è il grande amore della sua vita, tornata all’improvviso Con un terribile segreto. Chi è davvero Marie? «Un revenant»‚ spiega Rivette, «un non morto. I miti celtici raccontano che il Regno dei Morti è vicino a noi, a nord-ovest, separato solo da un fiume. Ma alcune persone pur morendo, non riescono a raggiungerlo e sono condannare a restare tra noi. Hanno un corpo che possiamo toccare, un’esistenza che possiamo condividere, ma sono animate dal desiderio ossessivo di poter finalmente attraversare il Fiume Nero e morire veramente».

Su questa storia Rivette 27 anni fa concepì un progetto ardito: quattro film indipendenti legati dal tema dell’eterno ritorno. Quattro generi diversi: da sentimentale al musical, da girare senza interruzione, uno dopo l’altro. Dopo i primi due, Rivette, stanco morto, comincia il terzo capitolo: Marie e Julien. Lui è Albert Finney, lei Leslie Caron, entrambi disposti ad accertare un compenso ridicolo pur di lavorare con tale mostro sacro. Ma al terzo giorno di riprese il regista crolla e il film s’interrompe. « Purtroppo non mie è rimasto neanche un fotogramma e non sappiamo quanto somigliasse a questa versione. Di certo, questo) è il film più emotivo e sensuale che Rivette abbia mai fatto», racconta Goffredo de Pasquale, autore della monografia appena uscita dal Castoro, curatore di una rassegna “tutto Rivette” in corso a Roma e Napoli.
Emotivo e sensuale, Rivette non lo è mai stato. Piuttosto: intransigente, assoluto, solitario. Il Saint Just della Nouvelle Vague Io chiamavano gli amici da Truffaut a Chabrol. «A volte avevo amaro molto un film, ma se Rivette diceva “è una cazzata” io dicevo come lui», ammette persino Godard. «AssomigIiava al gatto di Alice nel paese delle meraviglie. Era piccolissimo, semmbrava non mangiasse mai. Non per questo era meno feroce» ‚ ricorda Chabrol.
Testimonianza dopo testimonianza dall’ottimo libro dì Aldo Tassone La Nouvelle Vague - 45 anni dopo, il Castoro) emerge il ritratto di un critico spietato. di un uomo enciclopedico, di un cinéphile capace di unire cultura letteraria e filosofica all’amore assoluto per il cinema. «Questo sì, questo no»: e i sì erano, all’epoca, sorprendenti quanto i no. Sì a Mizoguchi, no a Kurosawa. Sì a Hitchcock, Hawks, Renoir, Lang, Ray, Rossellini. No a Clouzot, Autant Lara, René Clement e a parte Renoir, a quasi tutto ml grande cinema francese. Sì alla messinscena, no al montaggio. «Il montaggio è sempre stato il suo limite », commenta oggi Aldo Tassone: «Rivette avrebbe potuto essere un autore popolare se i suoi film li avesse montati Godard». La lunghezza esasperata, i tempi infiniti, la complessità teorica l’hanno reso da una parte un monumento del cinema francese, dall’altra uno degli autori più ostici per il grande pubblico Tanto è stato amato Truffaut, tanto misconosciuto Rivette.
«Dalla Belle noiseuse però qualcosa è cambiato. Ora Rivette si è come addolcito, avvicinato ai pubblico», conclude Tassone. «Come Truffaut, Rivette ci ha regalato personaggi femminili indimenticabili», lo difende De Pasquale: «Figure eroiche, inquiete eppure reali. Con lui persino Giovanna d’Arco (Sandrine Bonnaire) per la prima volta non è una santa invasata, ma una donna vera e moderna che conosce noia e paura». Così è Marie. Angelo e demone che Rivette insegue miei lunghissmi piani sequenza rivelandone fragilità, passione, infelicità, incapacità di vivere. Una persona, prima ancora che un fantasma. «Rivette aveva paura di questo film», racconta De Pasquale, «sentiva di essersi messo in gioco più del solito, di aver affrontato una passionalità nuova per lui». Che qualcosa sia cambiato lo ammette lo stesso Rivette. «Non sono cambiato solo io», ha detto, «è il cinema a essere cambiato e questo conta ancora di più. Ventisette anni fa ponevo l’accento sul lato fantastico della storia, oggi quel che mi tocca più da vicino è l’amore tra quest’uomo e questa donna. Il lato fantastico deve costringere i due personaggi a uscire da loro stessi, a confrontarsi con qualcosa che va oltre La loro comprensione fino a toccare il sublime. Se non saranno sublimi, non saranno nulla». Ma l’ascetico Rivette ha vinto, perché Marie e Julien sono sublimi. Disperatamente sublimi per ben 150 minuti di film. Non uno di meno.
Da L’Espresso, 17 giugno 2004