In a scene that occurs midway through Jacques Rivette’s 36 Views of Saint-Loup Peak, former circus performer turned textile designer, Kate (Jane Birkin) returns to Paris with a batch of fabrics that she has dyed during a visit to her family’s provincial circus and tries to match the color of the swatches to a Pantone […]
Jacques Rivette returns to the rigorous formalism and claustrophobic interiors of La Religeuse to create a refined, bituminous, and cooly smoldering tale of seduction, obsession, and manners in The Duchess of Langeais. Remaining faithful to the spirit of Honoré de Balzac’s nineteenth century novel (the second installment featuring the adventures of a secret organization known […]
Jacques Rivette creates another refined and sublimely enrapturing composition in The Story of Marie and Julien, a film that ostensibly chronicles the relationship between a brooding, reclusive restorer of antique clocks and occasional blackmailer named Julien (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) and the elusive object of his affection, a beautiful and enigmatic woman named Marie (Emmanuelle Béart) whom […]
On a lazy summer afternoon at a courtyard café of a provincial hotel, a lone, pensive artist named Nicolas (David Bursztein) abstractly observes a pair of English tourists and rough sketches them onto his journal before being distracted by the mechanical whirring of an actuated instant camera from an overlooking balcony. The surreptitious photographer is […]
Integrating the filmmaker’s familiar elements of whimsical, quixotic adventure (Celine and Julie Go Boating), integrated – but unresolved – conspiracy (Gang of Four, Secret Defense, and The Story of Marie and Julien), and liberated bohemianism (La Belle noiseuse, La Religeuse), Le Pont du Nord is an effervescent, ingeniously constructed, and infectiously affectionate paean to the […]
Behind the cloistered walls of a Paris convent in 1757, a young woman named Suzanne (Anna Karina), the sole remaining unmarried daughter of a prominent attorney named Simonin (Charles Millot) and his wife (Christiane Lénier), is reluctantly brought before the priest in order to take her monastic vows before creating a scandal by willfully (and […]