Here is the real avant-garde, not Barbie’s playpen.
‘Feminism is having a nervous breakdown,” observed Tammy Bruce, the former National Organization for Women president who is now a conservative pundit. Her axiom responded to the culture-wide insanity exhibited by female activists following Hillary Clinton’s 2016 electoral defeat. That madness is still with us, seen in the confusion among liberals and conservatives over the movie Barbie. But there’s a more revelatory, more important cinematic event: KINO Lorber’s Blu-ray release of several films by French New Wave director Jacques Rivette. These female-centered caprices bridge psychological comedy and dramatic fiction through storylines improvised by endlessly creative actresses, not angry ideologues.
The beauty that Rivette saw in the late Jane Birkin, Geraldine Chaplin, Anna Karina, Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, and Sandrine Bonnaire comes from their specific personalities. He presented their intelligence and emotions beyond the precepts of feminist standard-bearers that were popular from the 1970s into the millennium. The latest of the KINO releases, Up, Down, Fragile (Haut bas fragile, 1995), perfects the eccentricity of Rivette’s well-known Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974), internationally considered a key film in feminist consciousness, pre-breakdown. (KINO’s releases include The Gang of Four and Secret Defense, supplementing Criterion’s Céline and Julie.)
Rivette combined his dreamy cinema obsession with the charming creativity of young, talented, contemporary women who expressed themselves through acting. His unapologetically heterosexual New Wave colleagues (Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Eric Rohmer) made masterpieces out of their sexual fascination and puzzlement — never misogyny. And Rivette took the next step, revealing his own artistic sensibility, honoring his actresses’ ingenuity. Call it teamwork, or the ultimate compassion, but the result is an idiosyncratic oeuvre that analyzes film narrative; possibilities bloom during the search for love, satisfaction, and identity. It is distinct from feminism’s assertion of power that besmirches the idea of independence. He appreciates that their imaginations transcend the political limits of something like Barbie.
Going way beyond the puerile, unfunny, anti-male, anti-maternal playtime that poisons Barbie, Rivette and his French actresses (perhaps influenced by Simone de Beauvoir’s intimacy with Jean-Paul Sartre) understood the complexity of desire felt by women as idealistic individuals.
Back when Hollywood specialized in the “women’s picture” genre, movies showcased romantic plots that complemented female moviegoers’ emotions. Those New Wave critics-turned-directors were captivated by the cross-genre intrigue and open generosity of female-oriented cinema — it saved mid-20th-century movies from the nervous breakdown that Bruce recognized in the power-mad bitterness and chaos unleashed in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Since then, Hollywood has not produced a single film about women that’s not mired in umbrage or ineptitude.
Rivette’s nonstop improvisation was graced in technique and quixotic irony. In Love on the Ground (gorgeously shot by William Lubtchansky), Rivette goes beyond realism, imagining the emotional landscape of play-acted characters — Hollywood genre psychoanalyzed. It seems “crazy,” as Rivette’s acolyte André Téchiné pointed out, but this craziness is specific to cinephilia. Each sequence is a fleeting cinematic fantasy, as if modern figures were living in Marcel Carné or Otto Preminger or Stanley Donen movies. The imagination — Rivette’s improvisation — never stops. Yes, it is ludic, as Sight and Sound said; aimlessly playful; light, amusing, even satirical, with no goal except liberating human whimsy. In Haut bas fragile, Nathalie Richard on the nightclub dance floor loses sight of her partner and spins, akimbo, lost in her own revelry, evoking Alain Resnais as well as René Clair. For Rivette, such moments constantly renew fantasy. His films are inordinately long because his stories (his fascination) could go on forever.
You can get trapped in his private movie dramas made public. Yet he shows more rigor and style than Damien Chazelle and Greta Gerwig are capable of achieving. Rivette loves cinema, knowing it’s based on pretense and ephemera — and how lovely that can be (especially as photographed by Lubtchansky, Christophe Pollack, Caroline Champetier, or Julien Hirsch).
Anyone who thinks Barbie is avant-garde knows nothing about art but should experience what Rivette knew: “What is cinema but the play of the actor and the actress, of the hero and the décor, of the word and the face, of the hand and the object?”
Rivette presented a “personal universe” protected from the corporate, ESG-rating offense of the socially engineered Barbie and also from the political gender warfare — the nervous breakdown — left in Hillary’s wake.
Rivette is cinema’s ultimate deconstructor. He presents his actresses as not simply women but God’s creatures. Their modernity is classical, seen in timeless forms: Racine and Marivaux and cinema — as wonderfully demonstrated in The Gang of Four, a poetic extrapolation of the Kaufman-Ferber perennial Stage Door. Each character’s sense of adventure comes across as having movies in her head, like Rivette himself. After catching Rivette’s philosophy, conventional movies can never look the same.