Cinema of the World

Quote:

Jacques Rivette creates another refined and sublimely enrapturing composition in The Story of Marie and Julien, a film that ostensibly chronicles the relationship between a brooding, reclusive restorer of antique clocks and occasional blackmailer named Julien (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) and the elusive object of his affection, a beautiful and enigmatic woman named Marie (Emmanuelle Béart) whom he had once known at a time when both were emotionally unavailable. As the film opens, a pensive Julien sits on a park bench and begins to experience an unsettling, prescient dream involving his passing acquaintance, Marie, and in the process, betrays a sense of regret and missed opportunity at their seemingly star-crossed romantic fate. Now, a year later, his haunted, unrequited melancholy now seems entirely reconcilable when he runs into a hurried Marie once again while she rushes to catch a bus at a busy intersection and he, to an appointment with the subject of his blackmail: a woman called Madame X (Anne Brochet) who had perhaps murdered her sister. Illustrating familiar Rivette imagery of interweaving parallel realities, manifestation of the subconscious, and elliptical mystery, the film evolves into a gorgeously hypnotic, slow simmering, and smoldering tone piece on chance, connection, and destiny.
Acquarello @ Strictly Film School

[...]
With reference to his broader artistic corpus, Histoire de Marie et Julien may be Rivette's greatest achievement and most important work since his supreme masterpiece from 1974. At the very least, Marie et Julien is the equal of any of the films he has made in the past two decades – a period which included such major works as La Bande des quatre (1988), La Belle noiseuse and, most recently, Va savoir (2001). Indeed with these works, not to mention Hurlevent (1985), La Belle noiseuse: Divertimento (1993), Jeanne la Pucelle (1994), Haut bas fragile (1995) and Secret défense (1998), Rivette joins fellow Cahiers critics Eric Rohmer and, to a lesser degree, Claude Chabrol in sustaining an exceptionally high level of aesthetic rigour and invention late in his professional life. If anything, Histoire de Marie et Julien provides a theoretical advancement from even Céline et Julie, at least in terms of dissecting the process of narration in all three phases (though it should be cautioned that the earlier film still remains the bolder and more fully-achieved of the two works). Moreover, Histoire de Marie et Julien's position of pre-eminence amid those films belonging to his late artistic flowering is confirmed by its discursive complexity and the thoroughness of its examination of a subject that is central to this period in his filmmaking. Marie et Julien, like Céline et Julie (a point clearly not lost on Rivette, given the similar titles of the two works), brings to the fore many of his primary preoccupations, while adding an emotional depth not always present in the director's corpus. In other words, Histoire de Marie et Julien is essential to understanding the broader theoretical underpinnings of the work of this bona fide master, which is to say that it is essential to his corpus, even as it stands alone as a masterpiece of the first order.

Yet Rivette does not fail to demonstrate a freedom that augments the determinacy inherent in the rigour with which he engages questions of fiction formally. Especially in moments involving Julien's cat Nevermore, which at times the camera follows and which at other times Rivette photographs looking directly into the camera, there is an undeniable feeling of artistic freedom unbound by the demands of plot advancement or symbolic value. Even if Rivette's control of the narrative would strongly encourage one against reading these moments as aleatory, they do remain moments of spontaneity nevertheless.

In the end, then, Histoire de Marie et Julien remains a work of both exceptional formal constraint and manifest freedom. This duality is present in the film's final sequence, where a self-aware Marie tells an impervious Julien that they were once in love, to which he professes his doubts, saying that she is not exactly his type. Following this exchange is one last line of dialogue succeeded by an upbeat jazz song sung by Blossom Dearie that accompanies the closing credits. However, so as to not mediate the impact of the film's stirring conclusion, suffice it to say that Rivette retains the logic governing the preceding – of a film remaining forever the same in the life of its viewing – while inflecting his film's final moments with a fresh irony. Remarkably, given everything that has come before, Rivette finds a way to leave his viewer smiling. Maybe this is the greatest test of all for Rivette's fictional universe.
Full review: Michael J. Anderson @ Senses of Cinema