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2 out of 6 people found the following review useful: playing at love, 14 April 2007 Author: mr_white692
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
i would describe this as a doldrummy precursor of Last Tango in Paris. its about the disintegrating (sort-of) relationship of a theatre director-actor (jean-pierre kalfon) and his actress-wife (bulle ogier). its not so overwrought and turbulent as Last Tango in Paris, the people are more quietly anguished, and they only play at being crazy, great lovers. the orgy of sex and destruction at the end of the movie is really rather funny and sweet - they don't kill each other, they just go back to their lives. this is the first (and so far only) movie by jacques Rivette that i have seen. his technique as a director is astonishing. he has a beautiful compositional sense, the movie is incredibly fluid, and obviously got exactly what he wanted from the actors. they all are beautifully unselfconscious, and the two main ones have to do some incredibly difficult things. it's as close to a totally emotionally naked experience i've ever had at a movie, the technique is invisible, although paradoxically when this happens in a movie you know what an extraordinarily difficult thing it is to achieve so you gasp. there are some things in the movie that i don't understand and im afraid will turn out to be terribly pretentious. the movie is four and a half hours long and it spends a great deal of time on the production of Andromache that the husband is staging. is the comparison between the Greek tragedy and their marriage meant to be funny, or what? the movie has no particular story, and while i found it extremely enjoyable, it's sort of a cipher of a movie - is the director just showing us the lives of some people, or is there more at stake? the movie seems to be trying to give the impression that it is a documentary, that what you see is what you get, and rivette is clearly skilled enough for the viewer to accept this illusion. but we know its not a documentary (at least, i think it isn't, i don't know the production history behind the film but rivette is a French new wave director and i know that he likes to experiment with actors, improvisation, etc). i don't generally accept it when people in movies are pinned down into scenes that are meant to have some sort of meaning, but rivette's fake-documentary approach is a little perplexing. you wonder why you're watching certain scenes. its very ponderous.
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