Most films narrow us down, make as if reality is some solid, fixed, particular thing. I don't perceive it in any such dogmatic way in real life and what I'm after in the cinema is filmmakers who can show it to be fluid and empty of a particular reality, currents of colored air. Baudelaire spoke of the flaneur who walks the city in order to experience himself in the center of the multitude of possible views. Further back it was Taoists who talked about being able to wander far and wide, freely entering each thing without being fettered by its particularity.
With Rivette, as with Resnais before and Lynch after, it comes down to fictions within fictions, selves within selves or as other selves who hover in and out of experiencing themselves at the center of fictions. Possible views where no single one alone is real but they all make each other possible.
Everything with these makers often doubletimes as self-referential; obvious here, about actresses coming to a villa to rehearse a play at the behest of the author, coming and going from enactments of trysts and dalliances as part of the play to actual affairs taking shape outside the fiction in the same house.
But - as with Hiroshima mon amour and Mulholland Drive - it's the broader view that entices me with something like this, that it can chart that liberating path where reality is neither fixed nor on the other hand random, a surreal flight of fancy, but something is giving rise to its dreams and in turn inhabiting those dreams as itself. Rivette had done it before in Celine and Julie, he bestows us the gift of free wandering again here.
It's marvelous to be able to walk freely to find ourselves at the center of what he has prepared.
The main reality here is someone wondering about love, perhaps after a betrayal. It may be that only Geraldine or the woman- inside-the- play's character is real (but that doesn't mean anyone is imaginary in the sense of Tyler Durden where we know he is).
It begins with the two women discovering each other as mistresses of the same man, but instead of something that irrevocably happened in any one reality, we get it as the last scene of a play that unfolds inside an apartment, with the audience snooping after the actors in full view of the fiction taking shape.
Two actresses; one brash and free- spirited, the other reserved and romantic, both - like Celine and Julie - different facets of a self that dreams herself as either, both complicit in the effort to make sense out of some mystery concealed in the fictional play that requires their participation to come alive.
They fall for two men; both illusionists (playwright - stage magician) used to being in deceiving control of appearances, both were in love with the same woman who disappeared one night and the play, we find out, is about events of that night in the same house, disguised memory that needs a woman to come alive.
So as it comes alive in this house, all sorts of spontaneously arising views blossoms, not all of them as planned within confines of that story. Selves are swapped, Jane ends up playing the character of Paul the magician while being courted by him outside the play. Omens abound, premonitions of mystery; a hallucinated scene of murder, a mysterious dark room with boarded windows where one of the men sits alone in a chair.
Eventually, having persisted in the fictional remembered world where a woman (an inner woman wondering about love) is courted by those two, both are shown to be deceiving. It comes around with the last scene of this play with an audience in full view; but now the woman- within makes an appearance, summoned by the fiction to be chased off, the girls saving her for her own good. The premonition of death conspires to happen but, unlike the dream, no one really dies.
We get to freely inhabit without knowing; dreams, affairs, overlapping layers of illusion that can only come to life because actors comply to participate, and all this as a woman wandering through her own place in unfathomable emotions that were set in motion long ago. Eventually the fiction is shown to be empty. The women go out laughing. The statue of Cupid that she broke to pieces one night is magically put together and standing in its place.
To my mind, this is a milestone on the path from Lady of Shanghai to Mulholland Drive and that makes it indispensable wisdom.
Something to meditate upon
