Duelle (une quarantaine)

In this film, Rivette drifted towards the shallows of the tendency he already demonstrated in Celine and Julie Go Boating and Noroît. The essence of the problem lies in the fact that his Duelle is trapped by the plot, but it is not about the plot. Duelle is undoubtedly a European independent art film, but it retains (or tries to, because Rivette never made conventional films and could not "retain" their principles) a "Hollywood" focus on the plot. Antonioni (Blow-Up) or Wenders (The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick) served to us an internally coherent plot, only to purposefully (thanks to the open, unexplained ending) demonstrate its existential absurdity; in the films of the 80s and early 20th century (which are the only ones that can be compared here) Godard also retained the plot, but to such a reduced extent that the film can do without it and finally, while other art filmmakers either directly show the senselessness/impossibility of any plot (Robbe-Grillet, Lynch's Mulholland Dr.) or do without it altogether (Akerman in the 1970s, of the ones I know and now come to mind, but there are many, even infinitely, if we look at the genre of experimental film). Rivette presents to the viewer a film in which nothing can be followed other than the plot (the camera, editing, form - mostly nothing, and if so, then nothing revealing), which is boring, meaningless, but nevertheless, is somehow explained at the end (the openness of the ending is lost; there is no reflection on the essence of the story as such, which we have access to when the author shows us a particular story as meaningless, etc.). The viewer is caught in a plot that he cannot leave, but which does not want to say anything. That is why this film also does not say anything. (14/03/2015)