Rossini adapted Andromaque before the advent of theatrical naturalism, which is the direction in which Rivette further pushes Racine in L'Amour fou. In the movie, Sébastien (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) is playing Pyrrhus and also directing. Sébastien doesn't want the actors to recite the alexandrines but to speak them as if their characters were saying them for the first time and thereby to let the rhythm emerge — somehow. His goal is to make this 17th-century tragedy, which was first read to Henrietta Anne, Duchess of Orléans and first performed in the Queen's apartments in the Louvre, feel natural to his mid-20th-century paying public.

A contemporary source cited by Turnell reports that Racine's preference, too, was for the actors to deliver the lines with a "beau naturel" (a pleasing naturalness or simplicity; 346). This would be relatively easy for a 17th-century company working within the conventions of the kind of theater Andromaque typifies — they were part of the world that developed the style. The problem for Sébastien, by contrast, is that he doesn't have a technique to realize his ambition. Thus, he ends up drilling the cast endlessly and aimlessly, trusting that what he's after will emerge, although he can't quite specify what he's after.

Not for want of trying, however. About half the movie consists of the rehearsals for Andromaque and Sébastien's discussions about his approach both with fellow company members and with a journalist who is shooting a TV documentary about the production. (The body of the movie is in 35mm while the TV footage was shot on 16mm, both in black and white.) The most astonishing thing we learn is that Sébastien thinks that his method will put more emphasis on the actors and their insights and less on the director. That is, Sébastien is enforcing on his cast an idiosyncratic, vaguely formulated, and perhaps unachievable approach to the play as a way of de-emphasizing his own contribution. It's lunacy: he wants the actors to discover his great idea on their own. He'll know when it's right, but it never is.

Sébastien stands in for Rivette, who films much of the rehearsals in real time and gets at the uncertainty and tedium of them suggested by the French word for rehearsal, "la répétition." There's no way a movie director who demands his audience's attention for 252 minutes in order to indulge an attempt to approximate unstaged reality has truly relinquished his reins or can be unaware that this is so. Rivette, however, has a huge advantage over Sébastien because, unlike a modern director staging an interpretation of Racine, Rivette has conceived his modern narrative in terms of naturalistic technique from the beginning.