Love on the Ground (1984)

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Purely Joyful Movie!

One of my all time favorites.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

If you ever feel tired of the noise, the speed, the clutter of modern cinema, take a nice long (in this case, 169 minutes long - in the Director's Cut) break from all of it with a Jacques Rivette film; it's an experience like no other. As far from "art for art's sake" as it is from the mainstream, "Love On The Ground" is simultaneously very simple and very complicated: it's about the artistic process, the way life influences art (and vice versa), the quest for love, random human encounters (in the metro, in a bar), and magical visions of the future! It's not for every taste or mood, but if you are in the right mood (I was), you'll probably find it refreshingly unhurried and thoroughly absorbing. *** out of 4.

Most films narrow us down, make as if reality is some solid, fixed, particular thing. I don't perceive it in any such dogmatic way in real life and what I'm after in the cinema is filmmakers who can show it to be fluid and empty of a particular reality, currents of colored air. Baudelaire spoke of the flaneur who walks the city in order to experience himself in the center of the multitude of possible views. Further back it was Taoists who talked about being able to wander far and wide, freely entering each thing without being fettered by its particularity.With Rivette, as with Resnais before and Lynch after, it comes down to fictions within fictions, selves within selves or as other selves who hover in and out of experiencing themselves at the center of fictions. Possible views where no single one alone is real but they all make each other possible.Everything with these makers often doubletimes as self-referential; obvious here, about actresses coming to a villa to rehearse a play at the behest of the author, coming and going from enactments of trysts and dalliances as part of the play to actual affairs taking shape outside the fiction in the same house.But - as with Hiroshima mon amour and Mulholland Drive - it's the broader view that entices me with something like this, that it can chart that liberating path where reality is neither fixed nor on the other hand random, a surreal flight of fancy, but something is giving rise to its dreams and in turn inhabiting those dreams as itself. Rivette had done it before in Celine and Julie, he bestows us the gift of free wandering again here.It's marvelous to be able to walk freely to find ourselves at the center of what he has prepared.The main reality here is someone wondering about love, perhaps after a betrayal. It may be that only Geraldine or the woman- inside-the- play's character is real (but that doesn't mean anyone is imaginary in the sense of Tyler Durden where we know he is).It begins with the two women discovering each other as mistresses of the same man, but instead of something that irrevocably happened in any one reality, we get it as the last scene of a play that unfolds inside an apartment, with the audience snooping after the actors in full view of the fiction taking shape.Two actresses; one brash and free- spirited, the other reserved and romantic, both - like Celine and Julie - different facets of a self that dreams herself as either, both complicit in the effort to make sense out of some mystery concealed in the fictional play that requires their participation to come alive.They fall for two men; both illusionists (playwright - stage magician) used to being in deceiving control of appearances, both were in love with the same woman who disappeared one night and the play, we find out, is about events of that night in the same house, disguised memory that needs a woman to come alive.So as it comes alive in this house, all sorts of spontaneously arising views blossoms, not all of them as planned within confines of that story. Selves are swapped, Jane ends up playing the character of Paul the magician while being courted by him outside the play. Omens abound, premonitions of mystery; a hallucinated scene of murder, a mysterious dark room with boarded windows where one of the men sits alone in a chair. Eventually, having persisted in the fictional remembered world where a woman (an inner woman wondering about love) is courted by those two, both are shown to be deceiving. It comes around with the last scene of this play with an audience in full view; but now the woman- within makes an appearance, summoned by the fiction to be chased off, the girls saving her for her own good. The premonition of death conspires to happen but, unlike the dream, no one really dies.We get to freely inhabit without knowing; dreams, affairs, overlapping layers of illusion that can only come to life because actors comply to participate, and all this as a woman wandering through her own place in unfathomable emotions that were set in motion long ago. Eventually the fiction is shown to be empty. The women go out laughing. The statue of Cupid that she broke to pieces one night is magically put together and standing in its place. To my mind, this is a milestone on the path from Lady of Shanghai to Mulholland Drive and that makes it indispensable wisdom.Something to meditate upon

L'amour par terre (Love on the Ground) begins - as so often with this director - with people doing something that takes a while to be made clear. A group of rather bourgeois men and women climb the stairs in an old apartment building; they are ushered into a series of rooms by a set of male twins - the first of many times in the film where the "twinning" theme will be used. They watch a series of farcical scenes played out between a man (Facundo Bo) and his two lovers (Geraldine Chaplin and Jane Birkin) and it becomes clear that they (and we) are watching a play performed in an actual apartment. A play that quickly spills over into reality as the actor Silvano proceeds to become drunk on the real whiskey that he is drinking instead of prop whiskey - and the playwright Clémont (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) responsible for the piece, uncredited by Silvano who is apparently director and adapter as well as star, turns out to be in the audience.It's just another piece of theater blending into life, fantasy intertwined so expertly with reality that it's impossible to say at most points in the film whether we're watching a play, a dream, reality, a vision of the future, or a ghost story, another marvel from the French man of mystery Jacques Rivette. The three actors far from being chastised by the playwright all end up quickly encamping at Clémont's ridiculously extravagant white classical mansion, apparently in Paris when we first see it, but with the sound of the sea evident in at least one later scene; it is a house on the borderlands between the conscious and unconscious, between the players and their roles. Soon Charlotte (Chaplin) and Emily (Birkin) are playing roles that we find are thinly veiled autobiographical elements in the playwright's life, and soon they seem to spin out of control emotionally and towards insanity, as do most of the other guests/actors/writers involved in the improbable scenario.Filled with references to Dante (Virgil and Beatrice), mythology and early French history (Clovis) and the Zodiac which appears in mosaic form on the floor of the rotunda of Clémont's mansion, with sorcerers and premonitions of death, long-lost lovers who return at impossible moments, this is Rivette's most overtly magical and bizarre film since his pair of mystic genre films from 1976, "Duelle" and "Noroît", and like those films and much of the best of his work it is so long and complex that one viewing can hardly do it justice or suffice to touch more than a handful of its mysteries. Possibly the most significant of its literary/theatrical references is to Shakespeare, both in direct quotation (a minor character is translating Hamlet into Finnish and turns out - like many other characters) to speak flawless English and to know Shakespeare by heart), and in the references to Shakespearian acting conventions as both Emily and Charlotte at different times play the "pants" role.It may also be the most self-referential film in an ouevre that is filled with films that spill over into each other, with clear nods to "Out 1", "Céline et Julie vont en bateau" and the two 1976 films, and many elements that point the way towards later theatrically-influenced and ghost-entranced works like "La Bande des quatres" and "Histoire de Marie et Julien". And like much of his best work, it is completely unpredictable and contains elements of comedy, tragedy, the surreal and farce mixing in such an elegant fashion that whether the film will end in madness, murder, love or friendship - or all of the above - remains impossible to guess until the credits roles.A masterpiece, rich and complex and a film I will return to over and over....I'm only scratching the surface here.

I think the reason that Rivette is the least popular -- yet by far the most secret, profound and precious -- of the New Wave directors is that he can't be pinned down to a belief. He isn't political, though corporate conspiracies are a factor in many of his films; he isn't an occultist, though his films are filled with Zodiacal symbols, the tarot, magicians; he isn't interested in putting humans under the microscope like Rohmer, though he is minutely attentive to what breaks people apart and brings them together. No; rather, politics, the occult, and humanity are like the vines tying together the raft through which he floats in the void. They are methods to generate material, curiosity and, as lit students would say, a narrative where none necessarily exists. I hope I'm making this clear -- Rivette actually LONGS FOR a worldwide political conspiracy, preferably controlled by a dark magus operating from some deceptively plain apartment in Paris, with the whole human comedy under his spell, because he knows that the alternative, what most people call "reality," would be soul death. He wants more mystery, more confusion, more action. Unlike Godard, he isn't looking for utopias, certainly not those that can be brought about by politics; he wants the world to be as it is, in all its unfathomable, malevolent, messy beauty.As Jean-Pierre Kalfon says in L'Amour Par Terre – one of Rivette's most insidious and fascinating films, by the way -- "I don't want to make life better than it is; I want life." Rivette, like many filmmakers who have disavowed their faith, has really only sublimated his religious quest. His obsession with the creative process, its false starts, abrupt detours and unknown destinations, is unmistakably of a spiritual nature. As it turns out, he is obsessed with stories because the world as we know it exists in order to contain them. For Rivette, God is not an obscure savior ( what are we being saved from? ) but a generator of fictional material, the ultimate creative artist. If the other world is defined by its permanence, its frozen perfection, this one must contain everything that can possibly exist, and the human artist, such as Rivette, then becomes like a sort of middleman between heaven and earth -- he gives form to the transitory, thus translating it for eternity.Rivette's "strangeness" can be boiled down to his attempt to mirror God's mind by disavowing any ultimate truth. God requires stories in order not to be bored; stories require a world ruled by space and time where they can play out in a bounded setting, with a beginning and end; the world requires life in order to act out these stories. Stories, in short, require that we die. The two words that best describe Rivette's movies, "dark" and "childlike," come from the fact that, to accept that we are in a virtual, fictional realm, you must become as naive as a child for whom death is not real, yet who is subconsciously haunted by what it might mean. We die, but only because we're in a play. We die as children, but the curtain eventually rises ( he finally gives us a peek at what's behind it in his presumably final film, Marie et Julien. ) All this and more is part of why Rivette is so successful at blending the occult and the everyday – there is nothing more occult than the fact that we're here at all, pretending we know what we're doing.