Movie Review: Jacques Rivette's L'Amour fou - Mr. and Mrs. Natural - Page 4

At the same time we can see that Rivette's modern story is based on Andromaque. Sébastien's wife Claire (Bulle Ogier) was originally cast as Racine's Hermione but dropped out after a disagreement. Alone in their apartment while Sébastien rehearses day and night, sometimes so late that he sleeps over with one of the women in the company, Claire starts unraveling. At first she continues to work on her role with a tape recorder, but then becomes distracted. She begins recording telephone calls, and then, in a understated but cuckoo parody of Sébastien's — and Rivette's — forays into naturalism, she holds the microphone up to capture the street noise that comes in through the window.

Some of Claire's actions are more comprehensible than others. For example, she tapes a call from a young actress who breathily begs for a role in Sébastien's new production, any role no matter how small, and it's easy to believe that she wouldn't have called if Sébastien were not putting something out there to elicit such responses. This also means that while Claire may be out of the production, she is nonetheless in the position of Hermione, waiting for Pyrrhus's final decision as to whether he'll marry her as agreed or jilt her for Andromaque. Every now and then, while Sébastien is at the theater, Claire slips away to have perfunctory ego-stroking sex with an old flame, and thus she also has her Oreste. All that's missing is the dramatic structure which herds the characters toward the inevitable, devastating climax—slaughter at the altar of Hymen.

More and more, however, Claire's identity simply crumbles, which only pushes Sébastien closer to the company. At length the cast and crew realize that Sébastien's approach isn't gaining traction and at the peak of frustration he holes up for two days with Claire. He wants to reassure her that he is still primarily committed to her, but his motive may be more opportunistic than that. Whatever, it's heaven for Claire, though by this point she's so devouringly needy that their vacation from the outside world becomes an id-fest, in which they destroy the furnishings and fixtures of their apartment between rounds of sex. (Reputedly, this extraordinary passage is based on Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard's histrionic break-up; it could also be the kernel for Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972).)

You can continue to draw analogies between Claire and Sébastien as Hermione and Pyrrhus. In the apartment, for instance, it's as if Claire and Sébastien dig down and "discover" that the perfect marriage is all impulse and no structure, which is a fair description of what Racine's Pyrrhus wants (to renege on his betrothal to Hermione and go against his own people's wish by marrying Andromaque, the prize spoils of war, his defeated enemy's widow, instead). But what we see is that "actual" emotional trauma is even less like Racine than a naturalistic interpretation of Racine would be, precisely because the tragic narrative structure and the alexandrines have no analogy in "life." L'Amour fou reflects the texture-over-time of modern experience because those are the terms in which Rivette laid out the narrative.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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