223 Le Pont du Nord

[Matt]

I feel like Rivette is his own thing entirely. Loose, shaggy, improvisatory—very unlike the tightly controlled direction of a Melville, Chabrol, Becker, or most of Truffaut. I think Rivette was a fan of Cassavetes and Alan Rudolph, which seem like much better comparables than any of his French peers.

It probably makes me persona non grata around here, but I do not like Céline et Julie... This film feels fairly similar to that, but even more over-salted with whimsy. To me, it's just incessant chatter and nauseating handheld camerawork, with Pascale Ogier's wide-eyed pixie bit grating every one of my nerves.

I like La Belle Noiseuse quite a bit, but it feels to me very different from these two films: more constrained by location, small cast, long takes of drawing and painting. Very meditative. Beyond these, I've only seen Va savoir, so I'm not really qualified to say what a good entry point for his work would be. It's probably not this one, but it might also a good litmus test, too.

[pzadvance]

I may just have to dive in sight unseen for better or worse. I'm not sure who Rivette would compare to among his peers. From Godard, I love Band of Outsiders and really like Breathless but hated Weekend and couldn't connect with Two or Three Things I Know About Her, and his later works sound even less appealing. Love Tavernier, Chabrol, Melville and Becker. Truffaut is not my thing at all. I don't know if that helps anyone to gauge whether I should blind buy or stay away from Rivette.

You might just enjoy this then. I would just go straight to Celine & Julie Go Boating and catch up on the rest of Rivette afterwards. Nothing else is quite so accessible, and I think it offers a key by which to interpret what Rivette is trying to do in the various other movies he makes.

Thing about Pont du Nord, apparently Bulle Ogier approached Rivette about making the film as a sequel to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Third Generation, and it kind of works that way. I don't know if the film really makes sense without knowing that. Maybe? I first saw the film knowing that's what the initial impetus was. It never really felt like a movie that was complete without having seen The Third Generation beforehand, but maybe others see it differently. I've heard from people who think this Pont du Nord is the great Rivette movie above all others, like Kerpan and some other people in my daily life, but to me it seems much more slight. It is striking to see a middle-aged Pierre Clementi, but it's also kind of heartbreaking to realize that the knife-edge of youth is a fleeting impression, and that even someone as caustic as the young Clementi gets older and fuzzier and more like the rest of us.

never knew about this connection between Le Pont du Nord and The Third Generation, interesting! That's a Fassbender I've still yet to see but loved Le Pont du Nord in spite of that. Will have to check it out before revisiting the Radiance release.

[foggy eyes]

The feel of the city in this film, shabby and raw, as a playground for the fantastical possibility of fiction, is wondrous. Watching the film I remember feeling it was the closest I could likely get, as an adult cinephile, to days when I'd play make-believe with friends when young, itself fully improvisatory... A precious thing!