Jacques Rivette’s twelve-hour-plus Out 1, noli me tangere
richly justifies the investment made in watching it (and that even goes for
multiple viewings - I’ve completed it three times), even if it’s confoundingly
difficult to summarize how that is. To make just a few random and inadequate
points, the great length, and large blocks of time in which very little happens
(nothing at all by conventional narrative measures) exists in tension with a
sense of temporal fluidity and uncertainty: for example, the fact of so many
characters wearing exactly the same clothes in scene after scene suggests a recurring
state of stasis (while also constituting a kind of coding, and also channeling the
recurring sense of limited economic resources); even more than usual, a cut
from one scene to another in no way indicates here that the linked events are
taking place simultaneously. The film follows two sets of characters working on
classical texts, differing in their methods but neither seeming to approach a
performance (the leader of one group, Thomas, mentions at one point that three
days have gone by without really dealing with the material); the tightly focused
nature of these projects contrasts (and intertwines) with two other characters
preoccupied by hints of a mysterious group of thirteen that may or not actually
exist, and if it does, may or may not be of much import (we eventually learn
that the group did exist in a formative stage but is now dormant, its purpose never
fully formulated, the fact of the investigation itself possibly inadvertently
prompting it back to a kind of life), their efforts likewise carrying recurring
aspects of play and performance (the film at various times references chess,
solitaire, numerology, secret messages, dress-up and other forms of play). Likewise,
while there’s no sex in the film as such, the rehearsals often crackle with
erotic possibility (even from the very first shot); conversely, the few scenes
that most seem to be heading toward carnal intimacy usually trail off into
stilted, melancholy-tinged game-playing. There’s a constant sense of
reinvention: a character wins a million francs and briefly speculates dizzily on
what might change before the money is stolen, he and his friends then channeling
their efforts into searching for the perpetrator, a project carrying, in an
albeit limited way, a renewed sense of experimentation and improvisation (in these
scenes, as in many others, we’re often aware of passers-by staring at the film-makers,
which adds to the sense of vivid engagement with the possibilities of the immediate).
Ultimately, the film confirms certain aspects of possible conspiracy while
leaving others open (the prime mover “Pierre” is never seen or heard, although
it’s tempting to think he’s in effect director Rivette, or an avatar or
derivative thereof); it moves closer to intimations of the supernatural; it positions
some characters for apparent fulfilment while leaving others dead or bereft,
with a final shot reminding us of something we witnessed (much) earlier and
which was never adequately explained, indicating that the end of the film, even
one as long and stimulating and mind-altering as this one, is a merely
contingent thing.