Love on the Ground

 The cinema of Jacques Rivette is an acquired taste that I have yet to acquire. As with Cezanne and Cy Twombly, I have studied much to appreciate Rivette's work, but, alas, mostly in vain.  Rivette's movies, at least the ones with which I am familiar, combine whimsy, fey protagonists, and impenetrably complex narratives -- it's a combination of giddy playfulness and Euclidean mathematical rigor, incommensurate qualities that don't exactly fuse.  Further, Rivette's range is weirdly limited -- although he made all kinds of movies, including quasi-epic historical pictures (his diptych on Joan of Arc), Rivette's signature films are all alike:  someone is directing a play, the actors begin to assume the characters that they are playing, and distinctions between theater and reality blur.  Sometimes, the play assumes the form of a ghostly reenactment as in Celine and Julie go Boating (which channels Henry James); in other films, the play is classical as in Out:1 (Aeschylus and Racine), L'Amour Fou Racine's Andromache) or a brittle farce as in Va Savoir (a comedy by Pirandello).  In Rivette's most famous picture (due I think to its extensive nudity), La Belle Noiseuse the art work being created is a painting and the film shows the artist and his naked model engaged in endless rehearsals as to gesture and pose.  Rivette's iconic films are claustrophobic, exploiting idiosyncratic sets that enclose the theatrical action.  In these films, Rivette explores the consequences of play-acting or collaborative art and obsessively, I think, stages the same (or closely similar) scenarios over and over again.  Love on the Ground from 1984, for better or worse, is founded in Rivette's themes as to the interplay between theater and reality and is so typical of these motifs as to seem almost self-parody.  I should also observe that Rivette's pictures on this subject tend to be very long (Out 1 is thirteen hours long) -- duration becomes thematic in itself; the character's immersion in the theatrical process is so lengthy and spell-binding that outside reality gradually fades into something dream-like and inaccessible.  

In Love on the Ground, an arrogant, overweening writer stages a play  in a seemingly abandoned mansion somewhere in Paris.  As in many of Rivette's works, the setting, a weird combination of a Palladian manor with op-art interiors, is overwhelming and, probably, the most vivid aspect of the movie.  The manor possesses a great rotunda with the signs of zodiac inscribed in a circular mosaic band on the floor.  Huge classical pillars dominate the facade and there are mighty columns in the rotunda painted midnight blue and flecked with gold highlights.  In the rooms radiating from the rotunda, the walls are painted with odd geometric grids, vine-like splashes of red, or strange shades of light blue and dense camouflage-mottled green.  In the garden, there is a circular folly, classically Greek in form, on which a winged cupid stands on a pedestal.  There are peculiar martyrdoms depicted in terra cotta in niches in the mansion.  Huge stairways sweep up to galleries overlooking the zodiacal floor of the rotunda.  When one of heroines tries to make love to the cupid figure in the garden, it falls and is revealed to be a fragile plaster cast that shatters into a dozen pieces -- the girl buries the fragments but, later, a replacement cupid is again set on the pedestal.  There's a subway station nearby and the densely wooded and palatial grounds seem to be surrounded by the city.  There is a distinctly Sadean aspect to the company of actors and theatrical types who retreat to the secluded mansion, where they live together and end up in various sexual configurations, while rehearsing the play.  

The premise is that the author has staged one of his plays in someone's apartment.  The play is a bedroom farce involving the hero shuttling between two mistresses who have inexpediently appeared at his flat.  In the end, the charade collapses; the  hero gets drunk and introduces the two women who discover that they work together and resolve to be friends upon abandoning their loutish lover.  The  farce isn't funny nor is it particularly witty.  A silent group of about a dozen viewers stands in open doors and looks down corridors to survey the action.  The author, Clement Roquemaure, is impressed by the actors in the play and hires them to work for one week rehearsing his new work.  This play will be presented in the manor house secluded in the garden.  The two female actors are Charlotte (Geraldine Chaplin) and Emily (Jane Birkin) -- the reference seems to be to the Bronte sisters.  (There is a completely useless commentary on the film's DVD by Richard Pena -- he seems unaware of the importance that the Bronte sisters had in French Nouvelle Vague pictures:  they are alluded to in Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 and in Godard's Weekend.)  The girls are like Celine and Julie in Rivette's famous film of that name:  they are boyish hoydens, athletic with dancers' figures -- they might as well be called Huck and Tom.  These slender androgynous women seem to be the physical type that obsesses Rivette -- variants appear in all of his pictures; for Rivette, the ideal woman isn't particularly womanly but rather an antic, boy-girl prankster.  (In Love on the Ground, the playwright's previous lover, Eleonore, is more curvaceous, even voluptuous, and the film heaps special scorn on her.)  Charlotte and Emily are assigned color-coded bedrooms in the mansion -- Charlotte has a floral red room with splashes and tendrils of scarlet on the walls; Emily is given a lush green room.  

The play rehearsed at length in Love on the Ground is a variation on the bedroom farce that we saw fragmentarily performed in the apartment.  This time, two men compete for the affections of a single woman.  The handsome actor from the farce, Silvano, plays the lover who presently possesses the beautiful Barbara -- Charlotte has this role having deigned to compete for it by improvising a letter ostensibly to her love; Emily is not willing to compete against her friend, but it doesn't matter --she's given a "pants" role:  she plays Pierre, Barbara's previous lover, who suddenly appears at the place where Charlotte and her boyfriend are living together.  So far as we can determine, the play is pretentious and idiotic.  Six people are assembled for the week of rehearsals leading to the performance of the show for a small audience who is led on a tour of the mansion by Roquemaure -- this takes place on Saturday; that is, one week after the show in the apartment.  The film uses intertitles to establish the passage of time and is divided into seven parts, one for each day.  The six persons involved in rehearsing the play are the male actor, Silvano, from the farce, a rather shadowy character, a cipher who seems to be a drunk and gambler -- although, he's very handsome the man seems sexually inert.  Emily plays Pierre, Barbara's previous lover with whom she embarks on a new affair; Barbara is played by Charlotte.  Roquemaure has a butler named Virgil who prepares type-scripts of the play and, on the side, is translating Hamlet into Finnish. Virgil says he is invisible -- he walks on "pussy-foot" and claims to have written all the best parts of Roquemaure's inconsequential plays.  Paul is a magician.  He's also involved in collaborating on the play's script.  Paul, as we come to learn, is the model for Pierre. The play seems to be about Paul and Roquemaure's rivalry for the same beautiful woman, someone named Beatrice.  The extravagant red-headed Eleonore is apparently Roquemaure's former lover (and probably has been sexually involved with Paul as well).  She exists to quarrel with Roquemaure, to denounce his pretensions, and be humiliated by him, particularly as she is present, by implication, in the scenario that the group is rehearsing.  Curiously, the six main parts are mostly played by foeigners -- Silvano's role is played by an Argentine actor; Jane Birkin is English and Geraldine Chaplin is American -- she claims to be raised in her father's house in Carmel, California (presumably Charlie Chaplin's place) and Philadelphia.  Virgil is played by a Hungarian actor named Laszlo Szabo.  

The movie runs about two hours and fifty minutes and consists of a series of love affairs rather vigorously executed across the slender scope of six days.  Charlotte becomes Roquemaure's lover; Emily makes love to Paul, the magician.  Charlotte develops a passion for Paul and the two woman fight over him -- "like dogs," Charlotte says.  Emily gets flung to the floor and her head is cut.  (She has had premonition of this incident occurring -- from, time to time, both women see visions that turn out to correlate to events in the future.  The house has magical qualities -- it induces trances, strange episodes of somnambulance, and has a room that is either full of jungle animals or the surging sea.)  If I recall correctly, the women exchange lovers -- Emily is now with Roquemaure and Charlotte sleeps with Paul.  Then, it seems that Emily has sex with Virgil.  This is quite a lot of copulation to fit into six days. As in Jane Eyre, there's a mad woman in the attic.  Her footfalls are heard from time-to-time.  This is the beautiful Beatrice who was previously Paul's assistant in his magic show but who seems to also have been involved sexually with Roquemaure.  She appears at the end of the movie to disrupt Roquemaure's play with a little dose of reality since she is apparently the original of Barbara in the skit.  (The audience decries the stupidity and self-indulgence of Roquemaure's play and believe that it is degrading to poor Eleonore who seems to humiliated by being excised from the scenario entirely -- the spectators mostly walk out.)  Beatrice probably appears as a vagrant beggar in a subway scene in the middle of the movie in which she accosts Emily although this isn't clear to me.  She wears a vibrant red dress at the movie's end when she busts up the play.  In the subway, she wears a bright red stocking cap.  The play is a failure although it provides a framework on which to display the love affairs between the two girls and all the men in the movie (except Silvano who seems more interested in drinking and playing cards than making love.)  There is a prominent subtext involving Shakespeare's Othello; Charlotte played the role of Desdemona in that play in a college production and themes of sexual jealousy and infidelity from the Shakespeare work echo throughout the film, although reprised in a lighter, more inconsequential vein.  

The movie is handsomely shot and beautifully made.  But it's silly and repetitious and feels redundant.  And it's very tedious:  of course, art imitates life and vice-versa.  And, of course, actors can be seduced into blurring the boundaries between the real and imagined.  So what?