Secret Defense

1997, Jacques Rivette
Rivette’s style is noticeable in this film more for what it doesn’t do than what it does. He is now willing to use a lot more shot-reverse, and even on occasion to keep the camera still for long periods. The colour contrast is, as in much of later Rivette, rather low, presumably quite a slow film stock. The longer takes are perhaps less obvious than before. This film suffers from scenes of a static nature that are in-Rivette like. It still rolls along nicely, with some excellent touches such as the fade-out in the second to last shot, but is generally shot in a simple rather than exciting manner.
This film probably has more thematically common than ‘Paris Nous Appartient’ than any other Rivette film we have come across. The idea is in the lone female, whose subjectivity we are with, who is not exactly wholly endorsed, making her way through a world of tricks, lies and deceit. There are some striking images here, from the lab scenes, a kind of background glee in that weirdness; to the laboratory-factory we glimpse only once, an idea of a large conspiracy, somewhere. The scenes with the sunglasses also have this element of human lurking in them, which works very nicely.
This isn’t Rivette’s best work; the narrative does not manage to quite carry the film, and is perhaps a little one-dimensional. Rivette is still able to save it from catastrophe but making each scene and shot well-made, put together, with something to see, each character still entering and leaving with a kind of truth lacking in all but the finest filmmakers. These qualities are here; but this isn’t the best example of them.