Le Pont du Nord

This is one of the most fascinating films I've ever seen. Since then, I became a serious devotee of the director Jacques Rivette, the most important filmmaker among late/post nouvelle vauge other than Eric Rohmer. While borrowing the main two characters from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, they are trailing the city as if they were exploring inside the shell of a snail, which the city is actually constructed. The film shows you amazing scenery of Paris, absolutely not in a touristic sense. In this film, Bulle Ogier co-worked with her daughter Pascale Ogier, who played the heroine in "Les Nuits de la pleine lune" by Eric Rohmer, another unforgettable film and suddenly passed away at the age of 24, right after the film was released.

Alright, this must be said: as difficult as they are to see in many countries, the series of films Rivette made from "Amour Fou" to "Merry Go Round" are some of the most amazing, magisterial works of that decade, of all time even. "Le Pont Du Nord" is at the tail end of this streak, and is a minor achievement in comparison. However.

Even minor Rivette is fascinating, and the prospect of a female Quixote traveling through a late 70s Paris in a period of destruction/reconstruction, with call backs to the radical '60s (and a sly nod to Fassbender's "Third Generation"), and a score by Astor Piazzola, is enough to make anyone excited. There is something else, too, that I have not seen much commented on; the friendship between the two female leads, related as they were in real life, is a genuine pleasure to watch, and exists somewhere other than acting as we are used to thinking of it. Generally recommended, for fans of the director and the performers,I would say very strongly recommended, no hesitation.

I saw this in memory of Jacques Rivette who passed away the other day, a wandering soul who paved the way for so many cinematic walks.

Here he retraces steps he had already taken before, two girls daydreaming a life of adventure around Paris in Celine and Julie, a grid of fictions and elusive conspiracy unfolding across the city as he favored since his very first. There are watchers throughout the city, a satchel full of newspaper clippings - stories within stories - and a map that points at symbolic reality.

The deliberate obliqueness - the daydreamed sense - is of course always Rivette's tool of suspending burdensome logic but we don't really cross beyond here to something alive, we spend a bit too much time stuck in the map. He traces these steps without the freshness of a first time, without making his way finally to a clearing that will open up a sense of meaningful horizon.

The part that captivates me is the one that echoes Celine and Julie. Two girls once more, one reading from a book and summoning the other, brash one as her fairy guide in a world of fictions and rituals, both of them lovely. It's the sense of reverie in the walking around; for Rivette - a cinematic flaneur - the city has to be walked in order to yield its insight. The insight is in the train tracks that lead out, atop the Arc, in the construction developments at the outskirts of Paris where, now at the outskirts of fiction, the world is a mass of gaping and colorless structures. It's one of the most roaming films.

The last scene is a container on its own right for Rivette's purpose and unlocks the whole; a mock karate fight where the opponent is unseen, there are set motions and steps to take, it accomplishes really nothing, except the fictional enactment loosens up the spontaneous experience of playing in this way, which can only take place because story has been exhausted and we have finally arrived at the end of the maze. Or is it the shape fiction takes when unburdened anymore by any plot about money? Or does it escape from the fact that someone has just been murdered? In the French semiotic sense these mean one and the same, layers of an onion.

"Le pont du nord" is an overlong but enticing adventure of two women wandering on the familiar-looking streets of Paris, which within the film's internal logic, amount to a fantasyland. Though improvised, picture boasts strong continuity and a fresh unpredictability which should grab and hold the attention of arthouse audiences while, in common with most of director Jacques Rivette's previous games-playing films, eluding the grasp of general fans.

Bulle Ogier toplines as Marie, a newly-released convicted bank robber with vague terrorist background (resembling her role in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1979 "The Third Generation"). She bumps into Baptiste (Pasale Ogier), a strange young girl who attaches herself to Marie in rather aimless strolling around the French capital. Duo become involved with gangsters Julien (PIerre Clementi) has a briefcase containing a strange map of the city and files on political scandals. A mysterious figure whom Baptiste names Max (Jean-Francois Stevenin) also tails the duo.

Using excellent sound recording to create atmosphere, Rivette unfolds his spare narrative very slowly, finally emphasizing Marie's futile attempts to make sense of her (and Baptiste's) predicament by imagining a large-scale board game (according to the strange map) in which various areas are traps and which offers both danger and potential prizes to them as players. Her overactive imagination combines with Baptiste's paranoia and violent behavior to create tragic results when it turns out the gangsters are not playing games.

Bulle Ogier gives a riveting performance as a woman trying to escape her past and start fresh. Pascale Ogier (her real-life daughter) has a showy first starring role in features here, but her deadpan expression combined with physical volatility becomes dull through repetition and Rivette's unwillingness to condense his material. Her paranoia, imagining spies monitoring everyone and her violent attacking of eyes on posters which seem to be staring at her is a strong motif, which Rivette reinforces with the sound of whirring helicopters overhead and eerie surveillance camera footage at film's end.

Shooting entirely on exteriors, Rivette manages to inject a bit of explicit fantasy via a fire-breathing dragon, guarding the North Bridge, which Baptiste manages to quell with a "Tin Drum" style piercing scream. William Lubtchansky's 16mm visuals have been blown up to 35mm effectively.

Of all the critically-acclaimed directors of the French Nouvelle Vague (including Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol and Alain Resnais), Rivette has never received the approval of the general public. "Le Pont du Nord" will please his relatively small following but remains too private and obscure to win new converts.

My review was written in October 1981 at the New York Film Festival.