600
PARTISAN REVIEW
Duelle,
Jacques Rivette
Written in part by the director of
Serail
(and Rivette 's influence is
pervasive in the other),
Duelle
is an elaborate comic strip conceit, a contest
between the Sun Goddess (Bulle Ogier) and the Moon Goddess Ouliet Berto)
for possession of a talismanic diamond called The Fairy Godmother. It is a
mock detective movie, filmed in Rivette 's city of night and influenced , in
some
small way at least, by Godard's
AlphavzJle.
There is also
some
sense
of Cocteau, particularly in the shattered mirror scene in the dance hall.
Rivette is a major film maker, the most eccentric and adventurous of the
French new wave, and his films, which are beautiful , tend to an opacity that
may frustrate viewers who are committed to making sense in other language
of mysterious and untranslatable experience .
Duelle
mocks and occasions
itself, improvising within the framework of a determinedly absurdist myth–
ology. Rivette is a director of great visual wit and
Duelle
relies on the sug–
gestiveness of its imagery for its not inconsiderable achievement.
The Marquise of
O ... , Eric Rohmer
Where Rivette's cinema
is
seemingly free-spirited and anarchic, Rohmer's
offers the illusion of extreme, almost compulsive orderliness. These two
apparent opposites have, as might be expected from antitheses, much in
common . It is true that Rohmer's work is precise and intellectual (and vis–
ually elegant), but it is not without passion and humor and narrative drive .
The Marquise of
0 . . . , from the psychological story by Heinrich von Kleist ,
is Rohmer's fust literary adaptation and perhaps his least literary ftlm .
Among the film's other virrues-it is one of the most successful adaptations,
.faithful and transforming, of a first rate work of literature-The
Marquise
of
0 . .. is hauntingly detailed. Various images stay with one : The Count
.
in white uniform, always passionately serious, rising out of the night
to
save
the Marquise; the Marquise , under sedative, sprawled seductively in sleep,
her virtuous intentions betrayed by her dreams; the Marquise, on her father 's
lap, being cuddled as if she were a child (or a lover) . Rohmer's film, which
involves a "virtuous" widow who discovers herself pregnant with no recol-
lection of its occasion, is an anatomy of the duplicity (and sexual looniness)
underlying bourgeois morality. As with Rohmer 's moral tales,
The Marquise
of
0 . .. is exquisitely ambiguous, all manifest behavior a displacement of
deeper unadmitted concerns . Rohmer
uses
a German cast (the Peter Stein
Theater Troupe) in order to keep the original language of the literary text. It
is the film's visual language, however, its fluid, painterly
mise en scene,
that
is its transcendent virtue. An attendant irony: in adaptation, Rohmer has
achieved his most fully articulated film .
