Secret defense (Jacques Rivette, 1998)

 

Near the start of Jacques Rivette’s Secret defense, Paul Rousseau (Gregoire Colin) tries to steal a gun from his sister Sylvie Rousseau (Sandrine Bonnaire); his target is the successful industrialist Walser, newly suspected by Paul of killing their father, at that time Walser’s boss, five years previously. It’s a classic Hitchcockian-type set-up, and Rivette often plays it straight enough that the packaging of my old DVD copy gamely tried to sell the film as a conventional thriller (“A father’s death…A daughter’s obsession…Revenge was the only answer”). But of course, the director also continually subverts any such genre expectations and norms: a train journey which might easily have been condensed into a few seconds or less of screen time extends over fifteen or twenty minutes; a key revelation about the dead father is delivered almost casually, during another train journey; and so on. The film has a sense of magnetic contraction, with all the characters being drawn toward Walser’s country estate, a location with which the Rousseau family has a long connection (and one of many such labyrinthine, figuratively haunted locations in Rivette’s work); there’s often a sense of narrative echo, with the father’s death recalling an earlier family tragedy along similar lines, and with one key character who departs from the narrative rapidly replaced for most purposes by a look-alike sister. Bonnaire’s often flinty, brittle performance speaks to the strain of things not confronted within or without (an amusing subplot involves a persistent suitor who she perpetually keeps at arm’s length, without ever actually extinguishing all hope); the “top secret” of the title refers as much to unexplored inner or cinematic possibilities as to the specific folds of the plot. But overall, without buying into those marketing excesses I cited, the film would indeed be a relatively accommodating entry point into Rivette’s stunning cinematic world.