Great piece as usual, Allan, I love your writings on Rivette. This film is definitely great fun, a really charming and idiosyncratic vision of life as a game, where sheer imagination can transform Paris’ streets into a wonderland of interlocking conspiracies, mystical portals and strange rituals. I love this line: “It’s The Matrix as imagined by intellectuals acting as children.” If anything captures the special quality of Rivette’s peeling back of reality here, that’s it. It’s also, like most of Rivette’s films, about the power of film and theater as conduits of imagination. I love the scene where the claustrophobic Marie, who can only sleep outside, manages to spend the night in a movie theater because it’s showing Wyler’s The Big Country (whose French title translates to “wide open spaces”); the next morning, when she comes out, the theater is showing Clouzot’s La Prisonnière instead. For Rivette, the cinema can trap and imprison you, and the cinema can set you free as well.
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