Moreover, while Sébastien wants his actors to arrive at the emotional core of Andromaque via their own instincts, he's not getting past those instincts, if he's getting that far. One of the women in the company tells him that he can't work out his feelings through the production, but he doesn't hear. Thus, the movie is not "about" the confusion between art and life, but shows the separation of the two by dramatizing the confusion of a man of the theater who doesn't grasp its significance. Rivette depicts at length the collapse of a form of youthful radicalism due to inherent contradictions in its principles, and L'Amour fou is as daringly clear-sighted about what these young people fail to achieve in the theater as Godard's La Chinoise (1967) is about the limitations of the militant political wing of the student movement of the '60s.

Sébastien is lost long before he knows it and the sidelined Claire takes over the movie like a malignant wraith. No lead actress has ever played crazy less sentimentally than Bulle Ogier, who makes Claire almost dead-fishy in her mental disarray. There's no way for the other characters to connect with her stray, self-pitying, obsessive turns of thought, and she's incapable of accepting help, not in the sense that she'd like to but can't bring herself to, but in the more realistic sense that she doesn't recognize it as helpful. You can piece together how Claire got in such a state, but Rivette directs Ogier to make Claire's mania quite believably, sickeningly, Claire's own. Her emptiness is so genuine you can't project onto her, not even where in another movie you might, e.g., when Claire tries to steal a man's dog after Sébastien has said that a dog of that breed on a postcard resembles her.

In Racine, the inability to curb desire leads to tragedy. In L'Amour fou it leads to irony. Claire is both slighted and nuts, like Hermione, but she isn't a tragic figure. Rather, she's drawn naturalistically, i.e., with scrupulous fidelity to the facts of experience, such as they are, and her narcissism makes her psychologically vulnerable but also tough, a survivor whose escape route runs through bedlam. Once Claire draws Sébastien into her project of externalizing the mare's nest of her thoughts and emotions, and their collaboration runs its course, she's restored to herself and is free. Sébastien is heroic in terms of his artistic intelligence and effort, but the best sailor isn't likely to bring a rudderless ship to port. Claire turns out to be the more powerful "director" by far. Hearing of Claire's departure on opening night, Sébastien is so thrown that he doesn't even show up for the debut of his misbegotten enterprise.