Jacques Rivette 1981 France
Starring: Bulle Ogier, Pascale Ogier, Pierre Clémenti, Jean-François Stévenin
Jacques Rivette is a difficult bugger. Much like the great British director Peter Greenaway his films are fiendishly intelligent, genuinely odd puzzles that sometimes take 10 times the (regularly lengthy) running time to unravel, details being drip-fed so the viewer is often on the same level of understanding, if not a lower one, as the characters. They're also frequently brilliant. Le Pont du Nord was made during what's often referred to as the director's 'middle period', a time when, as in the notoriously experimental, thirteen hour Out 1, nothing was off limits. One of the many actors from that film, Bulle Ogier, stars here as Marie, an enigmatic ex-con desperate for a happy ending and feebly attempting to solve the mystery surrounding her no-good boyfriend ("stick it out, we'll be together in 3 days"), with her daughter, the tragic Pascale Ogier, as the jittery, knife and compass-wielding, James Dean-ish drifter who attaches herself to Marie, insisting that their repeated meetings are a sign of fate. The idea of freedom vs. design hangs heavy here with Marie representing freedom and Pascale's Baptiste as design, Baptiste even going so far as to claim that she's been 'preparing for something like this' for a long time. It's hard to argue with her. The first time we see her (in a beautifully filmed scene) she's on a moped riding through Paris starring down statues of lions as if daring them to come at her and within minutes she's practising martial arts and carving the eyes out of posters so they can't watch her. By the end of the film she's willingly fighting off a mechanical digger she imagines as a dragon (shown spitting fire and breathing smoke in some dazzlingly fun visuals). It's an incredible performance from Pascale, encompassing dreamy childlike innocence alongside threats of violence and paranoia. She has this incredible way of moving, constantly dancing from one foot to the other and playing spy like a child determined to protect its parent, wholly unaware that they probably don't need to. And yet neither woman dominates - it's even pretty arguable whether they're the main characters - instead allowing Paris the starring role. It's a really visually arresting view of the city, at times little more than waste grounds and construction sites, and one that soon covers it in a sprawling board game-like spider web designating different areas as frightening and deadly while others are just empty. And of course there's avid cheeky references to other films, even down to little comic moments like the claustrophobic Marie finally agreeing to spend the night in an all-night cinema because it's showing 'The Great Outdoors' then fleeing in the morning because the poster outside is being changed to Henri-Georges Clouzot's La Prisonnière (Clouzot actually fits well with Le Pont du Nord, his other films including The Spies and The Truth, both of which are parts of the narrative here). Despite all this the film isn't a complete success, overall becoming just too oblique to be completely satisfying. Even though you go in knowing there might not be a concrete conclusion (or plot), you still sort of want more of an explanation than you actually get.
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