L’Amour Par Terre

Jacques Rivette, 1983
This film does use some of Rivette’s marks; there are track-ins, it is generally shot quite long. Especially near the beginning, there is some virtuoso, almost Renoir-ish elegance in the sliding around locations. Throughout, going through doors and entrances. This film is more likely to cut around though, and follow the performances rather than vice versa.
The plot is another work of Rivette’s own. The shaggy dog story structure, with surrealist elements around the sides. At any one point, a plot strand is being ‘advanced’, and usually quite briskly. By ‘strand’ can mean anything there; an action, or a conversation, moving in a direction. By ‘advanced’, we mean is continuing on its own path, almost autonomous from all others logically. The connection is the location, the characters (who shift identities, thematically if not literally) and the mood. Rivette’s storytelling method still remains difficult to explain; whatever it is, it somehow creates a cinema different from classic methods, but that retains a grip on one that is beyond either the classical method or the more art-cinema techniques. The closest to say would be that it makes you focus on the very exactness of what is happening; there is no such thing as time (This method is not so prominent in ‘La Religieuse. The highest implementation of it we have seen is ‘Celine and Julie vont le batteau’).
For the thematics, it would be easy to wheel out the proverbs. There are obvious themes of feminine companionship, manipulation, pure fun outside of ‘normal time’. There are also, in the theatrical elements, questions of who is fooling who. Rivette remains the higher water mark for the usually tired question of ‘fiction vs reality’. It is one dream world. Again here, the colours, bright and abstract, matchnign clothes, are important. Some also rather funny moments, likely involved in the clear improvisation.
This film has a lot in common with ‘Celine and Julie’, so comparisons are inevitable, though completely unfair, one cannot be expected to match that masterpiece. Perhaps this is slightly more contrived, a little less able to reach the imaginative depths there. Yet there is still a feeling of pleasure, of a psyche out of reach, but all within a deeply immanent context. Elements of the female double act, the nightclub, the country house, the repeated performance, all follow.
Another fine, fine film from Rivette, different from ‘La Religieuse’, similar to ‘Celine and Julie’. He creates his own cinema; this is important.