L'amour fou (Jacques Rivette, 1969)

It’s only in the closing moments of Jacques Rivette’s L’amour fou that we learn the rehearsal process we’ve observed for much of the preceding four hours was limited to three weeks and that an opening night is looming; for much of the film we might have believed the process to be effectively infinite and self-justifying, the idea of a finished performance solely notional. In this regard, the play mirrors the challenging length and rhythms of Rivette’s film, and of his cinema as a whole – he would go from this to the twelve-hour Out One (for which L’amour fou often in itself resembles something of a rehearsal). It’s among his more pessimistic and closed films though, with a strong, entropic feel: the viewer might take from it the sense that such an artistic exploration is inherently capable of reaching an end, and that the attempt may only cause stagnation and collapse. As the film starts, the married couple Sebastien and Claire are respectively director and star of the play (Racine’s Andromaque) – she rapidly flees the production, ostensibly unable to tolerate the film cameras that he’s allowing to film everything. He recasts the role with an old girlfriend, while Claire continues to hover around the edges of the production: as his creative process breaks down, she experiments with finding her own mode of expression, some of this entailing the film’s most comic notions (as when she becomes obsessed with bringing home a particular breed of dog). Rivette deliberately confounds any clear reading of their relationship – a scene of apparent rupture might be followed by one of togetherness; ultimately they withdraw entirely from the world for several days, wrecking the apartment and seeming on the verge of becoming feral, but this too suddenly comes to an end. Claire ultimately breaks out, commenting that she’s “woken up”; Sebastien, it seems, can be allowed no such escape, art being ultimately less malleable than life. Rivette’s body of work would evolve toward easier pleasures and more composed expression: L’amour fou almost carries the sense of incubation, of one of cinema’s greatest artists ruminating and pondering his own future direction and its attendant limits.