Noroit (Jacques Rivette, 1976)

 

In Jacques Rivette’s original conception, Noroit would have been one of a four-film series of linked Scenes de la vie parallele. In the event, only two of the films were made (Duelle was the other) and the film is most likely to be viewed now in the shadow of Rivette’s towering achievement of a few years earlier, Celine and Julie Go Boating. Noroit shares many characteristics of that film – a focus on two women, a situation that clearly can’t be taken “realistically,” unexplained incursions of pure fantasy, to name just a few. But it’s also explicitly an “adventure film,” one of Rivette’s most physical works, with much gunplay and fighting (although of an abstract, stylized variety), scenes of heavy lifting, and Bernadette Lafont strutting around in some outrageous costumes, and unlike Celine and Julie, the two central women here are adversaries, with Morag (Geraldine Chaplin) working as a bodyguard for pirate queen Giulia (Lafont) while plotting to kill her for revenge. If the film often feels like heavier going than Celine and Julie, that might be seen in part as an appropriate reflection of the subject matter and the stakes (it also reflects the explicit citations of a 17^th century text, The Revengers’ Tragedy, giving the film a foothold in classically disciplined theatricality). But it does mean that it becomes most satisfying in its final stretch, as it takes on the sense of trying to escape its bonds – dialogue yields to dance, the image flashes to black and white or to red as if the cinematic apparatus itself were becoming unstable, and one character demonstrates both previously unsuspected magical powers and the capacity to replicate herself. It’s hard to imagine that Noroit is anyone’s favourite Rivette film, but it’s as absorbingly singular as any of them, in no way denying the validity of traditional pleasures, but incapable of presenting them passively or unquestioningly (even something as usually inherently “backgrounded” as soundtrack music is elevated here, several scenes showing us that the musicians are right there with the actors).