Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003) Reviews

• Stop the clocks; game time is over.

  Delly2005-10-28

  While The Story of Marie and Julien seemed to be a minor Rivette film to me when I bought the DVD, it's taken on whole new meanings in the context of his entire oeuvre, which I've been following at a local festival. What's immediately noticeable -- and Rivette movies need at least 10 years to age before really coming into their own, the moment in which they were filmed needs to have passed from concrete reality into vague memory -- is that Marie et Julien has the feel of a concluding statement. But unlike most concluding statements of great authors, such as Eyes Wide Shut, where Kubrick essentially undoes the arrogant moral and intellectual certainty of 2001 and admits he's going into the great beyond with the innocence and confusion of a baby ( or starchild ), this isn't about what Rivette has learned or unlearned during his 70-odd years on earth. What gives Marie et Julien its particular character is that its relative simplicity is not something arrived at but something that has been DELIBERATELY REPRESSED during the entire half-century of Rivette's career. Though it takes place in the modern day, one feels that Rivette is referring to a central personal experience that happened before he ever began making films, way back in the mists of time, something so primal that he's had to dance around it for fifty years, in a kind of monastic flirtation with death, sensually delaying the moment of his final consummation by immersing himself in the unknown. But all along, this was an act, a masquerade, just as he considers this life itself to be. All this time, he wanted us to be seduced by his reflections of life's mystery, in order to feel the vicarious joy of not-knowing, of fear and uncertainty, the only real pleasures of being human. But in truth Rivette, like Meister Eckhart, or like the goddesses from his own Duelle who beg to be made mortal in order to be divested of the burden of total awareness, has always been one of those from whom "God hides nothing." This greatest poet of conspiracy and mystery here admits the truth he's been puckishly concealing all along -- mystery, fear, terror are illusions. There is only love. The result of this unveiling, this outwardly old man's return to purity, hope and youth, for those ready to receive it, is a movie that accomplishes what so many charlatans through history have promised -- it defeats death. If you don't shudder at Emmanuelle Beart's final line, if you don't get a frisson at the opening sound collage of car motors and pedestrian noise being swallowed up by a ghostly drone, that's fine, it just means you are being kept in the dark temporarily while you complete your mission, whatever that may be. It's not for me to blurt out in a review what Rivette knows must not be said directly. Well, not in a FREE Internet review, anyway. P.S. See if, during one of the numerous sex scenes in this film, you can spot the oblique reference to Heinrich von Kleist's strangely cinematic play Penthesilea ( it dates from the early 19th century yet was considered unstageable then, being written like a modern film script with tons of brief scenes. ) I thought I was hallucinating this reference until I saw a Rivette documentary from 1990 where he talks about Kleist. The play, as everyone who has read it knows, is the greatest ever written about the damage that men and women do to each other on earth. That is half of what this film is about, too. The other half isn't about earth at all.

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• Relentlessly challenging cerebral ghost story

  gtzam2004-10-12

  Jacques Rivette's "Histoire de Marie et Julien" is bound to confound or disappoint today's audience, but not the followers of this director's work. The film does not conform to the dominant norms of current film-making that require a solid plot with familiar or identifiable characters whose actions are socially or psychologically motivated in order to have a semblance of verisimilitude. Its characters seem to inhabit more the filmic universe than a real one and a correspondence amongst those two is not straightforward to establish. The situations explored here (blackmail, amour fou, guilt, resurrection etc) and the characters actions are elliptically presented, but they, through a meticulous and extremely precise reconstruction of the filmic reality, uncannily make perfect sense within the narrative, provided that the viewer does not try to interpret the action using concepts alien to the filmic reality. The film requires from its audience constant participation to grasp its narrative subtleties and the patent exploration of abstract concepts such as time (cf. the last line of the film is "give me some time"; Julien is a clock meddler), the fusion of dream and reality (the first chance meeting is initially dreamt but occurs immediately afterwards; Marie's dreams command her actions when awake), guilt and redemption (the subplot involving the blackmailed woman and their sister) etc. The cyclic structure of the film with four chapter denoting different, albeit subtle, shifts in narrative perspective invite the viewer to adjust his approach according to the tonal modulations of the unfolding story. The reflexive nature of the filmic story becomes, thus, a vehicle for self-examination on behalf of the viewer of held preconceptions and ideas related to the issues unravelled within the film. A uniquely rewarding movie for those willing to be engaged in its narrative discourse. The work of a master.

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• A different sense of time

  gorbman2004-06-03

  The thing that has always been interesting about Rivette is the different sense of time that he creates through a more slowly developed story, spanning 2-4 hours on screen. Then when a real development comes along, it's such a surprise and pleasure (dare I say "as in real life?"). MARIE AND JULIEN has a mysterious story, but it's not suspenseful--you can guess what's going on fairly early into the film. Pleasure lies in getting to know the characters, watching Marie arrange a room, watching Julien take a clock apart and put it back together--and having your suspicions about the story verified. It's all perhaps more like reading a novel than watching a normal Hollywood film characterized by a tightly formulaic, time-bound 90-minute plot. And it's no accident that Julien is a clock repairman: that big clock he dismantles seems to stand for the very method and structure, and sense of duration, of this wonderful movie. A clock's ticking is supposed to be even, "in beat," but it's interesting too when the ticking is uneven!

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• Pas de deux, Pas de quatre: A Phenomenal Ghost Story

  gradyharp2005-08-30

  Jacques Rivette is one of the most under appreciated French film directors in history - and one of the most creative. He seems to dwell in a space known only to cinema, a world as changing, transparent, enigmatic, and transient as the camera's interplay with scenes and actors. His works do not fit into the expected mold of cinematic storytelling: his mind is far too fertile to follow roads previously taken. In 'Histoire de Marie et Julien' he suspends time (two and a half hours of it) to focus on the possibilities of the living and the dead and the planes of ambiguity incited by dreams. The story is less important than the questions it raises and the impact is powerful - if you just stay with him to the last frame. Julien (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) is an antique clock restorer, living alone with his cat 'Nevermore', a man whose seemingly dull life is touched by his role as a blackmailer to a Madame X (Anne Brochet), a strangely beautiful woman with dark secrets contained in a doll, some documents, and a letter - all somehow in the hands of Julien. Julien meets Marie (Emmanuelle Béart), an ethereally beautiful woman who appears to be both present and not present, depending on the moment. Julien first dreams of his encounter with Marie (as does she) and then they actually meet. In no time Marie is moving into Julien's large and musty home, surrounded by clocks and other elements suggesting time. They have a passionate love life and fall in love. Julien shares his blackmailing project with Marie and Marie is the one who is 'the other woman' in delivering parcels to Madame X in return for cash installments. Madame X's dark secrets include the suicide of her sister Adrienne (Bettina Kee) who appears to Marie in what seems to be an established relationship of some sort. Marie's duplicitous nature becomes more apparent. To tell more of this wondrous tale would destroy the slow unraveling of this mysterious love story: best it be seen by the viewers. All of the actors are extraordinarily fine. Rivette spends much of the movie with silences allowing the camera and actors to peruse the atmosphere, encouraging his characters to just interact with the clocks, the cat, the rooms, the parks, the mystery of that netherland of life after death. It is breathtakingly beautiful. The DVD adds poignant interviews with both Rivette and Béart and for once the featurettes add tremendously to understanding this difficult film. Rivette shares with us that he initially wanted to make this film years ago with Leslie Caron and Albert Finney, but that because he wanted the story of the film to grow into telling itself during the filming, he could find no financial backers. Having just viewed the film it would be difficult to imagine the same story with a finer cast than we have here. An unforgettable experience. In French with English subtitles. Grady Harp

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• Boring is the absence of ideas

  Franchini2005-08-15

  Why do certain people that go to the movies think that (their) being bored is important for the destiny of the world? Why do they keep punching us with their problems of boredom? Can't they understand that, to share something with the others, it's important to have some ideas (just a small one, please...) about the movie itself? Do they think that when they proclaim their boredom they are giving to the world some kind of undisputed law? Is it so difficult to understand that the Rivette work cannot be understood by the rules of mediocre entertainment? Is it so painful to address the simple idea that Rivette keeps filming the mystery of love? And that he doesn't want to bore us with the vulgar ideas of a vulgar TV-movie?

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