This movie has landed with a bullet in my top five movies of all time. (Don’t ask what the other four are, I haven’t figured that out yet.) Nothing cinematic has ever infiltrated its way quite so insidiously into my consciousness as Jacques Rivette’s 1974 film. Kieslowski’s Double Life of Veronique, Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour haven’t had quite the same effect. Mulholland Drive probably comes the closest, but on a more cerebral level – there was always something that needed to be figured out. Some of my more poetic favorites – Kieslowski again, de Oliveira, Maddin, Angelopolous – these all get squeezed out of the running by something special that’s present in C&JGB. I don’t pretend to know what that is, other than a perfect mixture of the cerebral and the spiritual, the goofy and the sublime, and the artful artlessness that keeps it all fun.

It is, on one level, a peculiar take on metafiction; perhaps a gleeful jab at Resnais’ and Robbe-Grillet’s arch seriousness, yet Rivette relinquishes none of his mastery over the genre. You get the sense that a fiction is unfolding before your eyes from the first moments of Celine’s (Juliet Berto) appearance – always coming into being just a few hundred frames down the line from the one before your eyes. The self-reflexivity that is unavoidable with the commencement of the story-within-a-story is full of the usual games: directly addressing the viewer, meta-awareness of the cinematic form, etc. but it is all done in a way that is still, overall, transparent, and in the end doesn’t call attention to itself.

Juliet Berto (whom I’ve seen in Godard’s Weekend and La Gai Savoir) really seems to come in to her own here as a wonderfully spontaneous actor. (In Godard’s movies, at least in La Gai Savoir, she seemed to be there primarily because she was cute and could say the lines with conviction, as well as perhaps her ties with Anne Wiazemsky. (This is unfair as I’ve only seen each of those once and wasn’t fully present for either, while I’ve seen C&JGB almost 3 times in its entirety.)

This is just a kind of placemarker to note my beginning but ongoing fascination (infatuation?) with this film. As I think about it more, and re-view it, I’m sure I’ll be back with more to say, but I’m finding that for now, there are too many flickering thoughts in my head about it that don’t want to cohere into anything that can be put down in words. The fascination extends beyond the movie – I’ve also seen and loved Rivette’s The Story of Marie and Julien (released post-2000, but from an original idea around the time that C&JGB was made, which makes complete sense), as well as his La Belle Noiseuse, and to a slightly lesser extent, Secret Defense, and his very early film, Paris Belongs to Us. I’m currently looking forward to seeing Duelle, Noirot, Love on the Ground, Joan the Maid, and Va Savoir. Unfortunately, Gang of Four has disappeared from my local video store and has a perenially “very long wait” status at Netflix.