Histoire de Marie et Julien

2003, Jacques Rivette, going ever so slightly batty
Within the more recent from Rivette’s styles, this employs faster cuts. The camera is constantly moving, almost without exception, in a comfortable, smooth, rich way, reframing and swallowing up more and more the emotions. The colours, in keeping with the tone, are relatively low key. Perhaps the key stylistic point is that this film, more than any others of Rivette’s use, with its two shots, track ins that almost verge on close ups. Not only of the face, but of other parts of the body.
This is a slower film, with a tension and sadness permeating each scene. Nothing is quite resolved, quite together, nothing is really going anywhere; there is a sense that there is something terrible around the corner, perhaps heightened by the slightly ‘off’ feeling of the characters. They don’t quite come together as they usually do for Rivette; perhaps partly down to a lack of empathy, there is a certain degree of reticence (perhaps partly because they know more than we do, a rare tactic with Rivette).
This film is, frankly, pretty obtuse in its subject matter, veering to sentimentality, but not quite allowing itself to go there. Its very nearly complete nonsense, but the tone isn’t quite right for that. There are moments when the air of sadness is able to come through. Rivette can still put a scene well, and there are lovely motifs of the cat, the contingency on the fateful march, among the clocks. It is difficult to know entirely what to make of this; lacking any kind of wryness or a light touch, it seems as frankly an experiment that the kitchen sink has been thrown at, and it successful in fits. Pretty watchable, but a bit awkward.