To deal with Jacques Rivette, it eventually becomes necessary to come to grips with the issue of length. At three and a quarter hours, this entrancing fantasy is far from his longest effort. In his own defense, Rivette will cite a "tradition" of length in movies -- Griffith, Gance. (He will also speak of this movie as the offspring of Renoir on one hand and Hitchcock on the other. Like all the critics-turned-directors from the staff of Cahiers du Cinema, Rivette talks a very good movie.) The kind of length he cultivates is not in order to make room for a novelistic elaboration and thickening. Rather it is the kind of length that comes from taking time out for following fancies, chasing butterflies; it is a thin kind of length. Further, there is a rawness about the movie -- a sense that the material has not been fully worked out, or weeded out. Above all, there is a sense that the material has not been severely judged: if a scene works, so much the better; if it does not, so what? The unpolished quality is part of the movie's charm, no doubt. But charm, striven for, flaunted, and laid on thick, is one commodity this movie is not short of. The two lead actresses (Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier) are attached to a very loose rein; and over the three hours, it is easily possible to be smitten initially by these two kooks, and then to cool gradually toward them as their friendship yields an increasing amount of girlish giggling and carrying on. Behind the improvisations of the performers and their indulgent director, however, there is a solid substructure: a carefully calculated program of parallels, recurrences, and reciprocations, and a strict stylistic division between the accessible Paris world occupied by a cabaret magician (Berto) and a librarian (Labourier) and the secluded drawing-room world to which these two heroines are transported via magic lozenges and from which they conspire to rescue a young girl who is imperiled by a murder plot -- a plot which, to untangle, they must pore over in scrambled bits and pieces, like a pair of film editors trying to arrange fragments of movie footage into a sensible sequence. Given half a chance, this seldom shown movie ought to attract a sizable cult following. With Bulle Ogier, Barbet Schroeder. (1974) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.