Jacques Rivette
1971
773 minutes
This is a notoriously long Jacques Rivette film. Almost all of his films clock in at three hours or more. This one, however, tips the scales at a whopping 773 minutes, just short of thirteen hours. You don't get the impression that he left much on the cutting room floor. It stars Jean-Pierre Léaud being his weird self but not quite Antoine Doinel. Michael Lonsdale has a major role, whom you'll recognize from a lot of other films. Celine from Celine and Julie Go Boating is in it as well in a very major role. Even director Eric Rohmer makes an appearance. This movie is so fucking long that you'll start to recognize the actors in their more famous appearances in other films from being in this film instead of the other way around.
Thirteen hours sounds really daunting at first, but this film is usually divided into eight episodes that are about 90 minutes each. That's still like watching eight full-length movies, but in modern terms it's a lot like binging an entire season or two of a Netflix show you really enjoy over a short period. For your own sanity, that would be an extremely poor choice here. It's going to take you about a week to watch this. It is a very slooooow film. And a good deal of the film seems to be Rivette's obsessive need to show the viewer how the sausage gets made for experimental theater. This film follows not one but two separate experimental theater companies as they get ready to get ready to get ready to maybe start thinking about how they are going to write and perform plays based on the Aeschylus plays Seven Against Thebes and Prometheus Bound.
Now would be a good time to do a Wikipedia brush up on the stories for those if you want to have any hope of knowing what the fuck is going on during these rehearsals, though the rehearsals are so abstract and bizarre that this may not even help much. There's a lot of primal screaming and role-playing and arguing about how to rebuild the text of blah-blah-blah that it may not matter much, but if you don't know at least the basics of who Prometheus is you are going to be quite lost and bored during those segments. You may be lost and bored during those segments even if you are well familiar with those plays.
As a matter of fact, now would alternatively be a good time to pause this film and go seek out some experimental theater's production of some ancient Greek classic such as Medea or The Bacchae just to get an idea of what the fuck the end result of these bizarre rehearsals might look like if there was any hope of them turning into an actual production, which in this case there probably isn't. If you have the chance, you might even want to join an experimental theater company that has put out a call for participants in one of their productions and show up to a few early meetings, though it should be warned that this is a very easy way to inadvertently join a cult. Once you have successfully deprogrammed, filed any necessary restraining orders against directors or fellow cast members, and detoxed from any hallucinogenic drugs you were consuming, come back and finish the first episode of this so you can relive the experience.
For other outside reading, it is heavily recommended that you at least skim Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark which will play a major role in unraveling the "conspiracy theory" that threads its way through the film. At least a passing familiarity with The History of the Thirteen by Balzac is also a bonus. You could also go back and re-watch Truffaut's The 400 Blows and imagine this as an alternate-universe story of what happened to young Antoine Doinel/Jean-Pierre Léaud after he got out of juvie in that movie and how dangerous it might be to find solace in books rather than make poor choices with women, though faux-Antoine Doinel manages to do both here.
In any case, this is a sprawling film that basically has two threads: two theater companies rehearsing to do Aeschylus plays, and a conspiracy theory one of the characters is trying to trace. In other words, it is typical Rivette, as you will discover from watching his other films. Make liberal use of the Wiki for this one to keep all the characters straight. Watch the primal screaming parts late at night with the volume up, your neighbors will love you for it.
Eventually a character will get shot, so there will be a little bit of action in the film. It takes forever to get there and of course they quickly move past it.
The best scene, however, is when Jean-Pierre Léaud is walking through the streets repeating the contents of the letter to himself over and over and over, trying to puzzle out its meaning. This is the most cherished scene in the whole film, particularly for the way other people on the street are reacting to this weird man being filmed chanting this weird thing to himself. There are about twelve hours of this film you are going to easily forget, but that one will stick with you for the sheer intensity and the hilarious background reactions while it happens, including some children who start following him trying to figure out what his deal is.
Thirteen hours. Remember, if nothing else you're doing this for the bragging rights. Stay legit, get your sitzfleisch ready, and then pat yourself on the back and move on to what is next.
Time to choose something different: