Jacques Rivette's Playful Cacophony

A woman sits alone at a cafe. She finishes her coffee, throws on her coat, grabs her book, and leaves money on the table. She walks through the streets of an old Parisian suburb. She enters a plastered building with massive red, wooden doors. She makes her way up the steps to the doors that have yellow windows. She walks up to—a stage? She sets her coat down and takes a beat while another woman rushes in behind her. They start to argue. The teachers stops them, “You’ll do it when you learn the text!” They’re bullshiting. “You’re not here,” says Constance, the acting teacher played by Bulle Ogier. “I don’t know where you are, but you’re not here.”

I think I’ve found my latest cinema obsession in Jacques Rivette. It was a long time since I’d seen anything by him—possibly just watching Paris Belongs to Us (1961) in college while trying to build a cursory expertise in French New Wave. But some months ago I finally watched what many consider to be his masterpiece, Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), a film which fully lives up to the praise yet is far stranger and gets deeper under your skin than its reputation suggests. The above sequence—the opening of his 1989 film Gang of Four—obsessed me.

Gang of Four is centered on two locations: the aforementioned acting class and a house shared by four actresses: Claude (Laurence Côte), Joyce (Bernadette Giraud), Lucia (Inês de Medeiros), and Anna (Fejria Deliba), who joins the group by taking over the room of the charismatic and private Cécile (Nathalie Richards). “You’ll see, my room’s nice… except for the ghost,” Cécile tells Anna before departing. “Oh, stop it!” A hint of the supernatural isn’t the only thing that imposes itself on this otherwise deceptively straight-forward film built around discussing performance—there’s also a crime thriller that unfolds around the increasingly mysterious Cécile, as an elusive man named Thomas (Benoît Régent), a friend of a friend of hers, he tells the girls, comes around and attempts to seduce the roommates to gain access to the house, looking for something Cécile has left behind.

It’s a playful thriller, a perverse romance, a movie about female friendship, and, in typically Rivettian fashion, a film so barebones that its actresses create a rollicking motion picture from thin air. People rightly point to the fun that Rivette and his actresses have while constructing their playful, prolix pictures—they’re films concerned with jouer sur scène and the joie de la scène. I think a part of this joy seen in making the film that gets relayed back to us while we watch (or any other Rivette) comes from how much Rivette gives the actresses to do.

There’s an incredible contrast between the contrivance of Constance’s stage and the cacophony of action going on in the seeming mundanity of the house, in that on the stage the actresses spend most of their time merely talking or moving intently about in their mise en scène, whereas in the house they’re free-flowing, always sitting up, standing down, leaning on a wall, fidgeting with something in their hands, holding a cigarette in an interesting way, running in and out of frame like they have things to do. If the opening is where I became obsessed, the scene early on where the women all have breakfast together is when I fell in love with Rivette’s style. Over their conversation lightly getting to know one another and introducing this new women into the group, the girls are framed in pairs of two-shots, dressing croissants and bread with jam, pouring fresh coffee or tea, hands never idle, always revealing as much about their character as anything they might have to say or how they say it. It’s a beautiful dance that Rivette lets the actresses play out, and I can’t take my eyes off of it.