Le Pont du Nord (1981)

Discussion of Jacques Rivette falls easily into two positions; a first, either a bored philistine or sharply analytic fan of modernism (whose descriptions converge, if not their valuations) finds his work to be allusively deep, "a radical and disruptive intervention in mainstream cinema on the formal level." The second position then asserts that, no, Rivette is actually "playful," whimsical, creative, improvisatory, collaborative. 

This film is quite similar to--and in my judgment, more likable than--Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating. Both films turn around a pair of eccentric Parisian women, thrown together and into the meshes of fantasy and conspiracy. (In the link above, the author breaks down the following binaries found in Celine and Julie: "Reality" vs. Fiction; Present vs. Past; Spontaneous vs. Staged; Freedom vs. Entrapment; Autonomy vs. Marriage; Female-centered vs. Male-centered; Telepathic Communication vs. Suspicion and Distrust; Friendship vs. Enmity; Childishness vs. "Maturity." All of these could be found in Pont du Nord without much trouble.) 

 But aren't these movies telling us something else, by the very people whom Rivette puts on screen? The two women in Pont du Nord (played by real life mother and daughter) are afflicted, broken, damaged, paranoid, detached, even dissociated, at no point functioning in any kind of social life outside of their own (fraught) dynamic. The elder woman, Marie, knows all of this, is self-conscious and anxiously worn down by the difficulties she knows represent her only options and (fringe) mode of being. She can't be indoors or in cars or trains, and sleeps outdoors, periodically meeting up with obvious bad news Julien. Baptiste, on the other hand, represents a Quixotic refusal to see her lonely, homeless existence as it is. At one point, she fights a dragon. ("Real life is a reign of terror," she has said.) The last scene finds her no longer concerned with the inevitable tragedy of Marie, who has capitulated to reality and abandoned the unhinged Baptiste in favor of her own death wish at the hands of Julien. The movie ends with Baptiste doing some kind of judo training at sunset, definitely beyond the grip of the "plot" we had been following up to this point.

 The movie shows us two competing forces: an anonymous (male) conspiracy, surveilling, collecting clippings on everyone, involved in crime syndicates and assassinations, building and demolishing a barren, depopulated outer urban zone... and on the other hand, the defiant, tender, needful, feminine perseverance and individuality that dodges and weaves through this sinister and coercive world. The latter is essentially "exposed," left in the open. This is not the Matrix. But there is a heavy, terrible price for this "whimsical" side--it could also be described as neurotic, obsessive, self-endangering, and extremely tenuous. It's not a question of good vs. evil or "strong female roles," but of the sacrifices and unendurable demands of being a free, creative self. What is "whimsical" here is a kind of sickness, a fatal, myopic flight from reality and health into compulsive regimens, "training," and incomprehension. But the human need for one another, is definitely on this side--it is ranged with the forces of reality-making, which are wan, exhausted, pushed to the brink, defeated--if only that was something Baptiste could ever admit or see.