February 2nd: THE STORY OF MARIE AND JULIEN (Jacques Rivette, 2003)

A clock repairman (also a blackmailer) runs into a mysterious woman from his past, and the two begin an intense, dangerous relationship.

Jacques Rivette was one of the founders of the French New Wave movement of critics-turned-directors, writing for the influential Cahiers du Cinema magazine before releasing his debut feature in  1961. After continued experiments with duration and narrative form, the mid-1970s saw Rivette embarking on another ambitious project: a series of four films called Scenes From A Parallel Life, each installment featuring a pair of dueling goddesses but in a different genre from the others.

Rivette completed two of the planned films, Duelle, inspired by film noir, and Noroît, a pirate adventure, and had started production on a third, Marie and Julien, featuring British actor Albert Finney and French actress Leslie Caron. Just days into shooting he had a breakdown due to "nervous exhaustion", and the completion of the series was abandoned.

While working on a book of his scripts for publication in the early 2000s, Rivette found notes made during the Marie and Julien shoot by then-assistant Clare Denis (now a successful director in her own right), which were used as a springboard to resurrect the project. He brought in frequent collaborators Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent to participate in a subconscious writing process that continued after the film had already gone into production, steering the plot along on various whims.

The cast is lead by two people who had previously worked with Rivette: Emmanuelle Beart, from the highly-regarded 1991 film La Belle Noiseuse, and Polish actor Jerzy Radziwilowicz, from 1996's Secret Defense. Both were invited to participate in the writing process and help flesh out their characters.

Behind the camera, Rivette once again used longtime collaborators (and spouses) William and Nicole Lubtchansky, as cinematographer and editor, respectively. The couple had worked with the director going back to the original two films in the planned series. The film was shot on location in Paris.

Some of Rivette's pet themes emerge, particularly fantasy vs. reality, and the director's oft-utilized atmosphere of conspiracy mutated from larger, widespread ones to more intimate, local deceptions. Unusual for the director are explicit sex scenes with the two leads, stressing the intimacy of this particular story, also one of the more emotional and moving of his career.

Running time is 2 hrs, 30 min.