In the Hands of a Master

Writing about the films of Jacques Rivette can be a little intimidating. It’s not that there’s nothing left to say about the nouvelle vague master, who consistently turned out thoughtful, measured dramas about the passions and frustrations of very fallible men and women – which somehow still felt playful, even when they ran to epic lengths – over the course of half a century.

Criterion has released just two of his films, his 1960 debut Paris Belongs to Us and 1974’s quietly fantastical Celine and Julie Go Boating; just going by the label’s mission statement of releasing “important classic and contemporary films from around the world”, they could easily make room for another dozen. Except that the rights to much of Rivette’s filmography rest elsewhere, with the Cohen Media Group – and they’re making the most of it.

Shortly after his death in 2016, Cohen announced it had acquired ten of Rivette’s later features, and three previously unreleased shorts, and would be releasing them in new 4K restorations – in director’s cuts wherever possible – in theaters and on Blu-ray. The epics were first to come to disc: His four-hour masterwork La Belle Noiseuse arrived in the spring of 2018, his two-part medieval drama Joan the Maid following at the end of 2019 … and then the pandemic shuttered theaters, forcing everyone to reconsider their distribution model.

Cut to 2023, and a new Rivette disc dropping every month: Cohen released The Gang of Four in January, Love on the Ground in February, Secret Defense in March and Up, Down, Fragile just yesterday. Where La Belle Noiseuse started out on an ambitious note, with an audio commentary from Richard Suchenski and archival interviews with Rivette and co-writers Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent, and Joan the Maid offered nothing beyond a couple of trailers, the 2023 discs share a spare, thoughtful aesthetic, supporting their respective features with scholarly audio commentaries from Richard Peña and re-release trailers celebrating the new restorations, fit for screening in cinematheques around the world. The movies are the focus, as they should be; it’s a pleasure to sink into the world of a master filmmaker, time and time again.

Made in 1984 and 1989, Love on the Ground and The Gang of Four feel like continuations of the fungible reality with which Rivette plays in Celine and Julie, with characters wandering casually into alternate narratives or even entirely different realities, and back out again.

Love opens with a group of strangers attending a performance in a weird old house, and being gradually drawn into the personal drama of two friends (Jane Birkin and Geraldine Chaplin) as the film’s tone grows inexorably darker – a transition made much more subtly in Rivette’s original three-hour cut – while Gang builds narrative elasticity right into the concept, following a quartet of drama students (Nathalie Richard, Bernadette Giraud, Fejria Deliba and Laurence Côte) who may or may not find themselves in the midst of several very different adventures – or just running scene studies. (It’s a little more complicated than that, and a great deal more puckish.)

1995’s Up, Down, Fragile, made as a quick recovery after the commercial failure of Joan the Maid a year earlier, is a light-footed musical about the romantic and professional rebounds of three woman (Nathalie Richard, Marianne Denicourt and Côte), it’s an oddball work filled with giddy little notions like Anna Karina turning up for musical numbers – with an antic-bordering-on-frantic energy that feels like Rivette is tap-dancing on glass. At any moment, he could put a foot wrong and slash open an artery, but he never does. It’s kind of thrilling, honestly.

And 1998’s Secret Defense is Rivette’s version of a thriller, casting Joan’s Sandrine Bonnaire as a young scientist whose brother (Grégoire Colin) enlists her in a scheme to avenge their father’s death; Rivette said it was based on the Electra myth, but he draws just as heavily on ’40s film noir and ’50s Hitchcock. It’s much more deliberative and cerebral than its inspirations, but at nearly three hours it pulls you in and never flags.

Cohen has yet to announce any further Rivette discs; the only title on their slate right now is François Ozon’s Everything Went Fine, which was just scheduled for May 16^th and which I am quite excited to see, having managed to miss it last year. But I expect we’ll see the next batch arriving sooner rather than later.

NEW RELEASE SHELF

Elevation Pictures released Infinity Pool on Blu-ray and DVD this week, and I wonder what Rivette would have made of Brandon Cronenberg’s latest exploration of decadence and disassociation; the two filmmakers do share a certain interest in the lives of privileged, morally flexible protagonists with a gift for wandering into the wrong environments, after all. It’s just that Cronenberg’s environments are a hair more … mooshy.

Infinity Pool accompanies blocked novelist James (Alexander Skarsgård) and his wealthy, indulgent wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) to Li Tolqa, a resort nation that caters to decadent Westerners so long as they abide by its curious customs, which include free-floating racism and a very strict justice system. They’re befriended by Gabi (Mia Goth), a fan of James’ first and only book, and her husband Alban (Jalil Lespert), and sneak away from their hotel compound for a picnic; on the way back, a drunk-driving incident lands James in prison, facing a death sentence. But the judiciary of Li Tolqa has a fix for tourists: For a fee, they’ll produce a perfect replica of the condemned – personality, memories, and everything – who can be executed while the original version goes free. James accepts, and soon discovers he’s not the only one who’s gone through this process. In fact, it’s kind of a perk of the whole tourist experience. And if you can afford it, it’s a thrill that can be experienced over and over again.

It's fascinating, about a third of the way into Infinity Pool, to realize that Cronenberg has effectively made his own version of his father’s Crash; both tell claustrophobic stories about rich, entitled people who descend into detached mayhem after sharing an unusual experience. But if the theme is the same, the manner in which the stories are told is very, very different: Crash is a sleek, sinewy affair, all chrome and flesh and hushed, furtive tones, while Infinity Pool is much more of a screamer. Possessor spent its time building to a hallucinatory blowout; Infinity Pool starts messing with head-splitting fugue states fairly early on and never really stops, as Skarsgård finds new levels of bug-eyed disbelief at the world he’s entered and Goth – the patron saint of needy hysteria after X and Pearl – finds a whole new level of mania for the last reel.

But I don’t know that the movie has all that much to say after its first hour; for all the gooey prosthetic effects on display, there’s not much actually going on under the hood. When Infinity Pool premiered at Sundance earlier this year, comparisons were made to Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror for its gicky application of a sci-fi premise to messy human drama – though I’d also argue Black Mirror frequently hits on an intriguing concept and then beats that concept into the ground so it can land on a nihilistic ending. The nihilism is very much the point of Infinity Pool, I suppose; I just wish there was more to it than the texture.

That said, Elevation’s featureless Blu-ray does a fine job bringing those textures home, replicating Karim Hussain’s deliberately flattened location work and production designer Zosia Mackenzie’s sterile, generic villas; the movie holds back its brighter colors for the viscous goo of cloning chambers and the sloshing fluids of hallucinations. I wondered how much more unnerving those weird, puckered face masks would look in 4K, but it feels like we can see every crease and wrinkle in the 1080p version. I was surprised at the absence of any supplemental material – the Possessor extras were fun! – but who knows, maybe there’s a proper special edition coming down the line.

In Sunday’s paid edition: A 4K release of Midnight Run leads a wave of very satisfying catalogue titles. Upgrade your subscription so you don’t miss out, and so I can afford to buy the good speaker wire.