Kritiken

There’s probably no greater filmmaker on the subject of paranoia than Jacques Rivette, whose work has given me a fair share of frustration, but which has also, over the years, opened up so many intriguing paths of exploration that I find myself returning again and again, hoping to finally break the code.

L'amour fou's final shot, as brilliantly obvious as anything that would be later imagined by Lynch, posits a bow to the theatre, echoing the opening shot's rise from the whiteness of the stage floor, as gesturing towards the stagey qualities of the relationship itself. The energies of creation and sex are mutually recurring, and both extinguish with the dissolution of the affair.

Rivette did not believe that film was the medium for sermonizing: L'amour fou instead offers a serious inquiry into film's complex means of production, which is why it remains one of the most powerful and political of films to have come out of the New Wave.

It begins and ends in the whiteness of the empty stage, the main actress walks off it as in Persona and the ensuing 252 minutes offer just as much harrowing disintegration... The tensions are between life and theater and cinema and theater, plus the curving pan of 35mm and the darting zoom of 16mm -- Rivette looks for complete control in a work about the overthrow of authorship, in the process unburdening himself of the prevailing directorial apparatus.

The rehearsals, filmed by Rivette (in 35-millimeter) and TV documentarist Andre S. Labarthe (in 16), are real, and the relationship between Kalfon and Ogier is fictional, but this only begins to describe the powerful interfacing of life and art that takes place over the film's hypnotic, epic unfolding; watching this is a life experience as much as a film experience.

Were I more of a Rivette-head, I might be able to forgive L'Amour Fou's frequent lapses into overextended contrivance masquerading as on-the-fly/fly-on-the-wall spontaneity: the numerous switches between 16mm and 35mm footage (anticipating Atom Egoyan, for better and for worse) hint at an aesthetic conversation that never coalesces into anything particularly profound. It is, instead, a successive series of disconnected actorly moments.

Much of what I "imagined" them to be, great and secret shows, happened to conform to the actuality of the films, all present there in their images, intimations, forms, ideas — in their aesthetics and in their experiential principles — so either I had a few manic flashes of prophecy or Rivette is the filmmaker who has turned out to be as weirdly in touch with the disposition of me, one spectator, as he has proven to be with his actors on- and off-set.

All confrontations duly occur (plus a clash between 16mm filmstock for the theatre scenes and 35mm for the rest), at a length that exceeds all obvious expectation - and thus begins to reach areas that conventional movies don't touch. Finally, even the pretentious title is justified by the shattering, improvised ending, which sees Kalfon and Ogier demolish each other and their apartment.