Mad Love (1969) User Reviews

Imperfect, but overall excellent

[I_Ailurophile · 8/10 · 25 June 2023]

16mm, 35mm, black and white, handheld camera, scant music, seemingly low budget, aloof characters with odd behaviors or habits: it's been awhile since I last watched an independent movie that truly looked and felt like an independent film, and moreover, truly was one. (Darren Aronofsky's 'Pi' comes to mind, and Kevin Smith's 'Clerks.') Though similar in length this is otherwise a far cry from the finessed mastery of 'La belle noiseuse,' to date my personal favorite of those films I've seen of Jacques Rivette; understated and very gradual as the progression of the narrative is I'm reminded of the films of Chantal Akerman, though this is a tad more meandering instead of simply deliberate (to the point that the length feels about as self-indulgent as it does meaningful).

Though possibly drawn out a smidgen more than is fruitful, the narrative core is outstanding. Slowly but surely the picture marks the painful disintegration of Claire and Sebastien's marriage, and more than that, husband and wife are both falling apart in their separate ways. Sebastien becomes increasingly cruel and indifferent, and moreover unfocused as rehearsals for his play flounder and go nowhere; Claire is plainly experiencing a mental breakdown, as much for the mere fact of the state of the relationship as for Sebastien's cold behavior. That both come full circle, and unite in a mutual sort of delirium before it all ends, makes the whole all the more delicious. I don't think the ebb and flow of the central relationship is depicted in a way that feels entirely natural, cohesive, or believable; some stops along the way rather seem to come out of nowhere. The screenplay is also imbalanced in terms of spotlighting Claire or Sebastien, the two of them together, or the rehearsals, and I think the writing of scenes and the narrative could have been tightened. Still, though uneven, overall the story is engrossing and compelling, and ultimately quite satisfying.

Rivette's direction feels weirdly loose, and maybe even scattered. I leave it to those who are more heavily familiar with the man's works to decide where his approach here fits within his oeuvre, though it's clear that it's intentional; regardless, it feels appropriate for the tone and style of the picture. So it is, too, with the acting, primarily that of chief stars Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Kalfon: Claire and Sebastien are both a mess, and I'd rather be worried if the players DIDN'T reflect those troubled states in their performances. While mostly reserved and tempered in keeping with the overarching tack of the feature, Ogier and Kalfon both illustrate tremendous nuance in their portrayals that's deeply gratifying as a viewer; we can't necessarily relate to the characters in and of themselves, but their actors make their emotions real in a way that is highly relatable and sympathetic. Mixed together with the terse scenes and story, imperfect though they may sometimes be, the result is somewhat entrancing. I would even say that my opinion oscillated throughout these four hours, and I was at best unsure of what I might have to say of 'L'amour fou' when all was said and done. However, all the varied pieces do come together quite nicely, and what strength the movie boasts well outweighs the weaker aspects.

It's not flawless, but despite its faults I find it to be much better than not. Would that Rivette and co-writer Marilù Parolini had firmed up the screenplay a bit, yet even at that the tale they've woven is absorbing and enjoyable. The cast are splendid; all those behind the scenes turned in fine work, including not least editor Nicole Lubtchansky and cinematographers Étienne Becker and Alain Levent. At large I very much like this. I don't think it's a masterpiece, nor a revelation, and I can understand how the runtime might be prohibitive for some viewers. It's solid and deserving on its own merits, however, and whether one is specifically a fan of someone involved or just looking for something good to watch, I think 'L'amour fou' is very worthwhile. Maybe just as much to the point, if this was all that I knew of Rivette and his collaborators, it would be enough to impel me to look for more of everyone's films; if that's not a compliment, then I don't know what is.

A great 184 minute film that happens to be 252 - but there's little else like it even from the Nouvelle Vague

[Quinoa1984 · 8/10 · 23 October 2023]

L'Amour Fou (translates literally to Crazy Love) probably is one of the most harrowing, unique, slightly (no, very much so) deranged, special and brilliantly shot in 16mm/35mm black and white relationship dramas of its or any era that has slivers of surrealism and dream-like beats but is largely drenched in a realistic approach to the cinematography and staging and that makes it all the more affecting.... And at the same time it is hard not to think this really could have been a 3 hour or even 3 1/2 hour or so film instead of 4 and a 1/2. To put it another way, sometimes when you're full from a meal and your friend keeps making you eat, you're going to barely be able to keep your belt from breaking off your body in a clump, if you take my meaning.

And I get it. I really, really do, please dont @ me; I comprehend that the length is a major part of the point, that we need to see the grind day by night by day how this relationship deteriorates so completely that when they somehow are happy again in the latter part it isnt any kind of healthy joy, on the contrary it is the kind of apocalyptic-level of being on Cloud Nine that feels like being on a drug (and the come-down will be that much more emotionally fraught).

Maybe there weren't the words for it at the time too, but the nature of the characters, who are mood swinging to the sky and crashing to the ground again, speaks to what one might describe as BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) or even like a chronicle of Bi-Polar disorder through and through and it's the fact that it's just... there and that honesty makes it compelling (one scene has Sebastien's assistant comment he should talk to someone; insert 'Men will direct agonizing Greek tragedy rather than go to Therapy' joke here).

So, Rivette puts the audience through the many productive and awkward and emotionally violent and turbulent and sorrowful and joyful days and nights where we gotta be with this couple and see the repitition and staging this play with these actors (some of who, I'm glad we are shown, are getting visibly tired and fed up with the moody director), and how that starts to send him into a downward spiral and so on. And there are stretches where this hits your heart and drops your jaw and when they tear apart that one wall it's darkly funny. But my goodness, this is so much cinema - and when I can point to specifics that could be cut (the sub plot with buying/not buying a dog), that's a problem.

Extra kudos has to go to the 2 lead actors, particularly Ogier (a Rivette regular and from Bunuel's Discreet Charm) who digs so deep into her pain to bring out what we see on the screen (or can pretend better than anyone from the 60s in France), who definitely were a main reason for keeping me in my seat until the ending.... even though the male lead Kalfon looks distractingly like a young Steve Martin to the point where I sometimes wondered if he would just go into a rendition of being a dentist and get over with. 8.5/10.

Mad love

[bob998 · 9/10 · 2 February 2016]

Yes, on the face of it, four hours spent in the company of stage actors rehearsing a Racine play might seem excessive. After all, how many changes can Rivette ring on a discontented couple who do all sorts of things to hurt each other? How many times can Claire cheat on Sebastien with that weedy fellow, and how many times can Sebastien flirt with the brunette who's going to replace Claire as Andromaque? Whatever the answer, I have to say I find the whole thing fascinating. The film crew sent in to cover the proceedings seems to comment on everything. At times it has the air of a high school dramatic society offering, at other times it's deadly serious.

The performers do everything expected of them. Bulle Ogier became Rivette's favourite actress; she is stunning. Bright, sullen, depressed, elated--she goes through it all. Kalfon appeared in a later film, L'amour par terre, as a playwright. He's all silky assurance until the confused ending. A wonderful experience, a must for Rivette enthusiasts.

Among Rivette's more pessimistic and closed films

[philosopherjack · 29 April 2019]

It's only in the closing moments of Jacques Rivette's L'amour fou that we learn the rehearsal process we've observed for much of the preceding four hours was limited to three weeks and that an opening night is looming; for much of the film we might have believed the process to be effectively infinite and self-justifying, the idea of a finished performance solely notional. In this regard, the play mirrors the challenging length and rhythms of Rivette's film, and of his cinema as a whole - he would go from this to the twelve-hour Out One (for which L'amour fou often in itself resembles something of a rehearsal). It's among his more pessimistic and closed films though, with a strong, entropic feel: the viewer might take from it the sense that such an artistic exploration is inherently capable of reaching an end, and that the attempt may only cause stagnation and collapse. As the film starts, the married couple Sebastien and Claire are respectively director and star of the play (Racine's Andromaque) - she rapidly flees the production, ostensibly unable to tolerate the film cameras that he's allowing to film everything. He recasts the role with an old girlfriend, while Claire continues to hover around the edges of the production: as his creative process breaks down, she experiments with finding her own mode of expression, some of this entailing the film's most comic notions (as when she becomes obsessed with bringing home a particular breed of dog). Rivette deliberately confounds any clear reading of their relationship - a scene of apparent rupture might be followed by one of togetherness; ultimately they withdraw entirely from the world for several days, wrecking the apartment and seeming on the verge of becoming feral, but this too suddenly comes to an end. Claire ultimately breaks out, commenting that she's "woken up"; Sebastien, it seems, can be allowed no such escape, art being ultimately less malleable than life. Rivette's body of work would evolve toward easier pleasures and more composed expression: L'amour fou almost carries the sense of incubation, of one of cinema's greatest artists ruminating and pondering his own future direction and its attendant limits.

playing at love

[mr_white692 · 9/10 · 14 April 2007]

i would describe this as a doldrummy precursor of Last Tango in Paris. its about the disintegrating (sort-of) relationship of a theatre director-actor (jean-pierre kalfon) and his actress-wife (bulle ogier). its not so overwrought and turbulent as Last Tango in Paris, the people are more quietly anguished, and they only play at being crazy, great lovers. the orgy of sex and destruction at the end of the movie is really rather funny and sweet - they don't kill each other, they just go back to their lives. this is the first (and so far only) movie by jacques Rivette that i have seen. his technique as a director is astonishing. he has a beautiful compositional sense, the movie is incredibly fluid, and obviously got exactly what he wanted from the actors. they all are beautifully unselfconscious, and the two main ones have to do some incredibly difficult things. it's as close to a totally emotionally naked experience i've ever had at a movie, the technique is invisible, although paradoxically when this happens in a movie you know what an extraordinarily difficult thing it is to achieve so you gasp. there are some things in the movie that i don't understand and im afraid will turn out to be terribly pretentious. the movie is four and a half hours long and it spends a great deal of time on the production of Andromache that the husband is staging. is the comparison between the Greek tragedy and their marriage meant to be funny, or what? the movie has no particular story, and while i found it extremely enjoyable, it's sort of a cipher of a movie - is the director just showing us the lives of some people, or is there more at stake? the movie seems to be trying to give the impression that it is a documentary, that what you see is what you get, and rivette is clearly skilled enough for the viewer to accept this illusion. but we know its not a documentary (at least, i think it isn't, i don't know the production history behind the film but rivette is a French new wave director and i know that he likes to experiment with actors, improvisation, etc). i don't generally accept it when people in movies are pinned down into scenes that are meant to have some sort of meaning, but rivette's fake-documentary approach is a little perplexing. you wonder why you're watching certain scenes. its very ponderous.

Andromaque Zombie as an image of an emotional world that seems to dissolve.

[Falkner1976 · 9/10 · 9 August 2023]

Extraordinary and long film by Rivette, who reinvents himself with this kind of mockumentary about theatre, full of dead times, and which defines many of the aspects of what will be the director's work from now on.

By no means a rehearsal for Out 1, but a great film absolutely mature in itself, and as interesting as the more famous and marathonian following work.

Claire and Sebastian are a married couple of actors from the Parisian experimental scene, embarking on the project of representing Andromaque by Racine. Sebastian is also the stage manager. The film begins when, after a dispute over how to recite a reply, Claire decides to leave the project and Sebastian replaces her with Marta.

With Sebastian embarking on this project that he is passionate about but very minority oriented and Claire without a job (and not interest in finding it) and spending the mornings recording herself on a tape recorder, surprisingly it does not seem that they have financial problems to make ends meet.

The film alternates scenes of private life with long rehearsals being filmed by a television crew.

Sebastian's rants about his revolutionary concept of acting are very typical of the time, posing a way that they want to pass off as revolutionary. The rehearsals, to call them somehow, naturally take place on an empty stage and the actors, to call them something, read their parts in the purest zombie style with a tone of unbearable laconicism. What is supposed to internalize emotions is actually shown as disinterest or inability to express them.

This is repeated in the relationships of the characters offstage: Claire and Sebastian apparently love each other, but there is a certain coldness and self-absorption that is frightening. Sebastian doesn't even show real interest in his infidelities, and rarely comes out of a distanced laconicism, and Claire shows her superficiality when she capriciously wants to buy herself a dog (buying herself is the best way to call it) because she likes the photograph of a pet on the cover of an album. .

Claire begins to show clear signs of imbalance and depression. She wanders around the house, while Sebastian sleeps (apparently) terrifyingly caressing her eyelids with a needle...

At one point, without us having witnessed any specific crisis, Sebastian decides to spend his nights at the theater, while Claire slits her wrists in an apparent clumsy suicide attempt. But in the next scene we have them casually spending an afternoon together, as playfully distant as ever.

There is something annoying and unpleasant in the environment and in the behavior of the characters, an emotional emptiness that is almost terrifying: like the actors on stage who seem to be talking to themselves, unable to show their emotions and declaiming without any conviction a text that seems impossed to them, in the same way outside the essays the characters are equally isolated, laconic and self-absorbed.

I like Rivette's concept of de-dramatizing his films, and lengthening the times, giving us the illusion of a world that runs with absolute naturalness. Even in the more eventful second part of the film, we don't get that feeling of stepping into a movie plot.

The second part is more dynamic, the long scenes are mostly replaced by agile parallel editing, the shots are shortened, there is a planning of the scenes and a manipulation of the contents with expressive purposes that becomes more evident. Even the rehearsals begin to be manipulated in the editing, interspersing different scenes and making their character as a commentary on the actors' own lives more clear.

Faced with the actors incarnating a role of traditional cinema, and the "non-professional" actors of neorealist cinema, or Bresson's models, Rivette seems to choose a different path, choosing his actors clearly for their own personality and showing them in the least manipulative possible. That is why we intuit that there is a lot of improvisation, that they work on minimal plot lines.

The two leads are magnificent, especially Bulle Ogier. Little more is required of the rest of the cast than to appear natural.

One of Rivette's great films, with the director's characteristic treatment of time (some would call it unbearably slow), but without the fantasy element that Rivette will include in almost all of his other films, more along the lines of La belle noiseuse than in that of Celine et Julie vont en bateau.

Lourd

[Zbigniew_Krycsiwiki · 4/10 · 16 April 2015]

Strikingly photographed, low key cinema verite, sometimes difused, sometimes harsh, high contrast black and white; it's almost like we're watching a film/ play, *and* a "Making Of" documentary of same, as the drama and dissolution of a marriage unfolds during rehearsals for a theatrical production- but the film goes on for four hours, and little happens, until a 20 minutes long mix of amour et fureur, as the couple take axes and chop down the walls of their apartment, and smash their television set with the same ax, vandalise the walls, and maybe reconcile.

I greatly enjoyed Rivette's later, Out 1, and can see its foundation being layed here in its lengthy runtime, and conversations filmed in mirrors, but I found this film to be quite a chore to endure. I look forward to watching Out 1 again, but can't say I have any interest in watching this again (and I watched it twice already, hoping something would click for me, but no such luck)

(Yawn)

[cstotlar-1 · 3/10 · 28 April 2013]

I saw this back when it was released in Paris. In those days I had only begun to watch films seriously so I didn't have much experience concerning when to leave or when I was allowed to get bored. I stayed through the whole thing - all three hours plus - and came out genuinely perplexed. It was a talkathon, no question about that, and at times it seemed to me that the actors were just making things up as they went along, just treading dramatic water as it were. Although not much of anything happened or was even said, the characters discussed the nothingness to the point of madness, I thought. It seemed at the time to be a huge joke on the audience. The director did in fact make a commercially viable film years late with "Celine et Julie...", still quite long - to the point of undermining itself - but not as obnoxiously obsessed with its "meaning" or "significance". There are in fact many good French films out there that aren't endurance contests as I subsequently found out.

Curtis Stotlar

The word BORING doesn't justify...

[BlissQuest · 2/10 · 18 December 2017]

4 hours+ to tell a dull story! Chain smoking french men and women rehearsing for Greek play, and some weak-ass relationship drama on the side. That's it!!! I started fast forwarding after 40 minutes, and I can believe I actually endured that much. A complete waste of time, so don't bother!