Le Pont du Nord (1982) (Masters of Cinema) Dual Format (Blu-ray & DVD)

This was my first Rivette. Captivating and unlike anything I'd seen before. Even calming. Obscure and a bit eccentric too, but in a subtle way that never gets annoying. Paris is filmed gorgeously, and the picture has a warm early 80's look (similar to e.g. Polanski's Frantic)The pic quality of the Blu Ray is very good.Now I'm hungry for more. Can't wait for the Arrow Rivette Collection.

"Daylight is for power, the night for violence." There is menace all about us. Innocence is that which is unwary and therefore destined to fall. To fail to recognize evil because of a pretense of normality will ensure disaster. Hidden from us are the serial "coincidences" which make up our seemingly "free" movements.We can move this way or that, but time is not linear and the future may not necessarily lie ahead. There is an older woman, just out of prison for some kind of political activity. She has hitchhiked to Paris to search for a comrade. In the city she is befriended by a young leather-jacketed priestess of the surreal and dangerous Paris behind the "real one" who vows to protect her, and they wander through the city on paths laid out by a board game they discover in a stolen briefcase. They will find clues but no questions, a body but no reasons; the "comrade" appears and disappears, becoming more menacing all the while. This film is a masterpiece that will haunt you as it has haunted me for almost 30 years. Analyze it at your peril...

Thank you to the Masters of Cinema Series for releasing this film.I saw it thirty years ago and it has stayed with me ever since.How well it survives the test of time remains to be seen, so thefive stars is an act of faith but also an award for the adventurouspolicy of the distributors.Rivette is undoubtedly a major influential figure in World Cinemabut I would remind people that he, like Truffaut, gives himself themodest (lower case) mise en scene credit at the end. Not for him thepompous, grandiose "A film by" authorial title that is common-placetoday and often unearned and unwarrented. His roots are in the theatreand he knows that it is a group enterprise. He brings together aregular team of writers, actors and technicians so it would be muchfairer and more accurate to see him as a superb conductor leadinga small orchestra of soliosts. Viva la bande de Rivette!PS What about Out 1 now?

....and very cool.

Perfect

I was looking forward to seeing this as I imagined it was going to be another 'Un Homme Qui Dort', but it's so disappointing, I'm not even going to give it two stars. Starts off ok but gets bogged down pretty quickly. After a while I got the idea that someone ran off with the screenplay and they continued making it up as they went along.

not my favorite MoCinema movie but worth a look

Two women,strangers to each other,Marie and Baptiste,meet up by chance and wander the streets of Paris.Rivette has taken an actress well known to him(Bulle Ogier) to act the part,largely through improvisation,of ex-con Marie,who is claustrophobic and cannot bare to go inside closed spaces.The principle of construction is like Celine and Julie Go Boating,day 1,day 2,day 3,day 4.Marie's mission is to find true love,she is driven by paranoid fictions, seeing Paris as a sprawling game-board marked off with tucked-away conspiracies,a return by Rivette to old subject matter,to retrace his steps.The film is a spiral drawn on a map of the city for a Game of the Goose.Between labyrinths and traps,fears and yearnings,there is a constant evocation of perpetual movement of "theoreticalfight against imaginary enemies",taken up by Baptiste(Pascale Ogier,Bulle's actual daughter),a knife-wielding,self-proclaimed karate expert with a drive to slash the eyes of faces in adverts.,who accompanies Marie on her quest to solve the mystery behind the contents of her former lover's,Julien's(Pierre Clementi's)suitcase:an amalgam of newspaper clippings about abductions,killings,robberies,and maps of Paris that points to an unsettling labyrinth of signs and portents whose endgame is unclear.Now all the above is very much a Maguffin in a film that is beautifully shot by cinematographer Lubtchansky of post-revolutionary Paris.This works due to the natural chemistry of its leading ladies,their interaction,the nature of imagination and memory through a play-within-a-film,the question of what is going to happen to the ladies,the unfolding itinerary of derelict sites,building sites,railway lines,a Paris being destroyed and reconstructed,brought alive through the creativity of play.Baptiste has totalitarian fantasies of being watched by eyes,lions,dragons,spies('Max's) which she fights like Sancho Panza.Cinema for Rivette is closer to dreams and illusions, living through our desires,but true because we aspire to recreate these dreams in real life.They have to build an imaginary life in a city that is falling apart.They are both caught up in the board game,Somewhere-Else-in-Gooseland.The adventures of the actual shoot mirrors the adventures of the characters.No artificial lighting,fiction that courses through the streets,refused the refuge of enclosed space,use of reportage methods as if surprise was paramount. Everything is seen through the eyes of the 2 heroines.The project mixes the memory of our heroes and situations in Don Quixote. .The concrete and scrap-iron city is like a desert(or ghost-town),the Indians(the Max's)are everywhere,there's shelter to be found at night,places to get some water,a compass, showdowns. Rivette takes the blow torch of his genius to scrap metal revealing the hidden structures,painting a tableau of France from his own tower.Breath-taking.