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Le Pont du Nord (Jacques Rivette, 1981)
🕑 Added 2019-01-28 21:37:16 +0000 UTC
What a joy. It's strange how few Rivette films I've actually seen, when compared with the amount of pleasure the ones I've seen have given me. With the exception of Celine and Julie Go Boating, I have only seen late Rivette thus far, those being his films from Secret Defense onward. You might reasonably ask, what have I been doing with my life? Not only are these films delightfully unpredictable in their trajectory and defiantly porous in their diegetic closure. They quite possibly represent the closest that the semi-official French New Wave came to intersecting with the concerns of the American Avant-Garde. It's not just that Rivette and ace cinematographer William Lubtchansky frequently worked in 16mm, although that's a factor. There's the fact that the sense of play and openness one finds in Celine or Le Pont du Nord more than resembles that found in the "Baudelairean cinema" of the 1950s and 60, of Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith, and Christopher Maclaine.
Le Pont du Nord stars the mother and daughter team of Bulle and Pascale Ogier as Marie and Baptiste, a pair of misfits caught up in some sort of nefarious scenario involving Marie's boyfriend Julien (Pierre Clémenti). The confusion starts with the very introduction of Baptiste's character. She is unstable, randomly practices kung fu moves, and seems to have a literally quixotic tendency to see violent monsters menacing her everywhere. What's more, the fact that she has a boy's name is briefly addressed, but the sex or gender of the character themself is never clarified.
Baptiste just gloms onto Marie, who has only just been released from prison. She and Julien are reunited no sooner than he is making vague excuses about why they have to wait several days before they can be together. By swiping Julien's attache case and snooping, the two women discover that Julien has a large file of news clippings about organized crime and other municipal matters, along with a map of Paris with a nautilus-shaped game board drawn on top of it.
To solve the mystery of what Julien is up to, and who (if anyone) is trying to harm Marie and/or Baptiste, the women try to solve the puzzle and play this arcane live-action game. They appear to be beset by an enemy team, a group of men named Max. But this could all be Baptiste's delusion. Rivette's use of the small 16mm framing and an ostentatiously unscenic Paris -- all construction sites, cranes and cement -- helps provide a sense of anxiety, if not exactly claustrophobia. (Due to a personality tic of Marie's, there are almost no interiors in the film.)
This is a movie about the city as a drab gray obviousness, invigorated by semiotic. Baptiste sees signs everywhere, like the many stone lions on the public fountains, and assumes they are trying to tell her something. In this way, Rivette plays with the ambivalence of symptomatic reading. Le Pont du Nord is about the pleasure of the text gone too far, becoming a kind of masochistic joy in paranoia. If forces are really aligned against you, after all, it means you were "right all along."
