Movie #66: Released in 1974, directed by Jacques Rivette, 193 minutes. New to me!

LetterBoxd Score: 3.5 stars

There’s a lot of interesting ideas in here:

• The premise that there is a magic house where ghosts(?) re-enact a tragic scene, and you can take part in the pantomime and then re-live it via a candy from the other side, and then that you can rescue someone from that tragedy with magic is… pretty unique
• There are lots of hints gesturing at this all being tied up in children’s play. The dolls are everywhere, Julie has a photo of the magic house in her trunk with her dolls, elements of Julie’s life are in the ghostly melodrama (mostly leaving a family to travel the world), her grandma lives next door and when she visits she is transported back to childhood (giant teacups and all)
• There’s a through current of fan fiction, or viewer seizure of the story apparatus – most explicitly in the ending, but hinted at in the beginning with Céline drawing all over the library books
• I missed it myself, but apparently the beginning where Céline keeps dropping things is evocative of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland
• There’s a lot about subverting various assigned roles for women, again most vividly in the ghostly melodrama, but Julie and Céline also play act as each other in various stereotypical roles, and even the beginning chase sequence feels a bit like a playful act.
• Another angle I missed at the outset was the context that this is all playing out shortly after the 1960s, when there was a feeling that it was possible to upend the status quo (represented by the moneyed old-timey ghost pantomime) and invent something better.

On top of that, the two leads are really authentic and their playacting feels real. I also laughed out loud at the payoff to the title.

And yet, ultimately my response to this is similar to my response to Pierrot-le-Fou, which I’ll just quote from for a minute.

I think my trouble is that I just don’t share many of Godard’s interests. He’s a film critic; he apparently has a deep understanding of how film conventionally works. And I guess he’s bored by that convention. And I’m not. I guess I think of great movies as ultimately presenting themselves as a window onto an imagined reality that we become involved in. I want a movie to work on that level, and then if there are meta questions involved, that’s like the icing on the cake. But, for me at least, this is all icing.

Put another way, for me, when a film feels like its most interested in making an argument with some kind of symbolic language, it’s hard for me to get invested in what’s happening. There aren’t really stakes in this movie. We’re not super concerned that they will ultimately be trapped in ghostland or fail to rescue the child. That’s just not what it’s about.

Why would someone think it’s one of the ten greatest movies ever made?

I think I lot of my ambivalence would evaporate if I was sufficiently charmed by the two leads. If that works for you this, would probably be a top-to-bottom romp, but with something interesting to say.

Next up: Mirror