Rare Rivette

Jacques makes a sometimes musical

Lovely French actress Emmanuelle Béart spent hours in the nude as an artist's model in La belle noiseuse (1991), surely the major reason Jacques Rivette's film got American distribution. Rivette, born in 1928, remains the least-seen in the USA of the original New Wave critics-turned-film-directors (the rest: Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol). I can think of only three other works in his distinguished 40-year career to be shown here commercially: La religeuse (1965), L'amour fou (1968), and Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974).

Two reasons for the relative obscurity of this major filmmaker are Rivette's disinterest in publicity and his aversion to travel. I have never seen him at a film festival anywhere in the world, even when one of his pictures is showing. He stays home in Paris: he reads, works, goes to lots of movies. He has viewed everything significant in the history of cinema, and he's written seminal critical appreciations of such directors as Hawks, Lang, and Preminger.

And then, Rivette's films don't exactly beckon to profit-minded distributors. For one thing, they're enormously long. La belle noiseuse clocked in at 240 minutes, and that's typical. Rivette makes his movies as lengthy as he feels they should be (he's his own editor), just the way novels can be any duration. The rhythm of his cinema is private, personal, and not tied to the metronome of commercial cinema. The pulse of MTV? Hah! In 1971, he made a film called Out One stretching 11 hours.

As for his stories: well, they are intentionally half-baked ones, sketches of narrative that hold the promise of climaxes, catharses, dénouements but never quite get there. The hours of watching a Rivette movie are not rewarded with a payoff at the end. Often the film just shuts down. So where is the pleasure of Rivette's very radical brand of cinema? It's in our agreeing to have our attention redirected from trying to find out things (and in Rivette's gameplaying, he teases us to believe there are mysteries to unravel) toward simply seeing what's unfolding before our eyes.

"Enjoying the process" is the secret to watching Rivette. Many of his films are about rehearsals of dramas instead of the actual productions; we the audience peek into rehearsals for a movie, conceptions of a movie, improvisations for a movie. For Rivette, this "before" -- when actors are still more themselves than their parts, when they are trying out their roles like someone dipping feet into cold water -- is where the interest lies.

That's a Rivette-length lead-in to plugging Haut/bas/fragile (1994), his 169-minute sometimes musical that's playing at the Museum of Fine Arts July 12, 20, and 23 and at the Harvard Film Archive July 25 through 27. As usual, there's no American distributor, so these are your only chances to see his fascinating aesthetic at work.

This time, Rivette tantalizes by setting up three stories of young women who -- watch out! -- ordinary cinema logic tells us eventually will come together. Ninon (Nathalie Richard) runs away from a murderous boyfriend and an unseemly life (as a hooker?) for a new apartment and a job as a messenger girl on a moped. Louise (Marianne Denicourt) comes out of a five-year coma, plus life in a mental institution, avoiding her mysterious father while taking over her dead aunt's house. Ida (Laurence Côte), brought up adopted, works in a decorative-arts library and seeks out her real-life mother.

This is Rivette, so the daydream narrative (Lewis Carroll is always an influence) meanders all over the place. Ninon and Louise gradually criss-cross, but far less for story than to sing a silly tune together, and to improvise a dance on a nightclub floor. Ida's story never connects with theirs except for sharing some characters. As for Ida's finding her mom, it might be nightclub singer Sarah (Godard icon Anna Karina). It might not be.

What does it all mean? Nothing, a cloud puff, and I'm sure Jacques Rivette would agree. But Haut/bas/fragile is, in its underformed way, an amusing and charming almost three hours in the dark. I was especially enamored of actress Nathalie Richard (the lesbian costumer in Irma Vep), who uses up lots of screen time with leisurely dancing. Of course, Rivette lets her. Why not? What's the hurry? Parts of what Richard does seem vaguely choreographed, Twyla Tharpish; most of her stuff seems made up on the spot, a talented amateur swinging out with the music. In truth, tied to my MFA seat watching, I felt like jumping up and dancing too: the triumph of Jacques Rivette.

THE JUNE 16 New Yorker contains one of the finest essays I've ever read by an actor, Stephen Fry's "Playing Oscar," the British thespian's homage to Oscar Wilde, whom he portrays in the new film, Wilde. It ends with Wilde's stirring letter from jail where, imprisoned for his homosexuality, he remained unrepentant of the unwieldy artistic life versus the fate of "the mechanical people," whose tragedy is that they choose to be businessmen, judges, lawyers . . . and succeed.