If you ever feel tired of the noise, the speed, the clutter of modern cinema, take a nice long (in this case, 169 minutes long - in the Director's Cut) break from all of it with a Jacques Rivette film; it's an experience like no other. As far from "art for art's sake" as it is from the mainstream, "Love On The Ground" is simultaneously very simple and very complicated: it's about the artistic process, the way life influences art (and vice versa),the quest for love, random human encounters (in the metro, in a bar),and magical visions of the future! It's not for every taste or mood, but if you are in the right mood (I was),you'll probably find it refreshingly unhurried and thoroughly absorbing. *** out of 4.

L'amour par terre (Love on the Ground) begins - as so often with this director - with people doing something that takes a while to be made clear. A group of rather bourgeois men and women climb the stairs in an old apartment building; they are ushered into a series of rooms by a set of male twins - the first of many times in the film where the "twinning" theme will be used. They watch a series of farcical scenes played out between a man (Facundo Bo) and his two lovers (Geraldine Chaplin and Jane Birkin) and it becomes clear that they (and we) are watching a play performed in an actual apartment. A play that quickly spills over into reality as the actor Silvano proceeds to become drunk on the real whiskey that he is drinking instead of prop whiskey - and the playwright Clémont (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) responsible for the piece, uncredited by Silvano who is apparently director and adapter as well as star, turns out to be in the audience.

It's just another piece of theater blending into life, fantasy intertwined so expertly with reality that it's impossible to say at most points in the film whether we're watching a play, a dream, reality, a vision of the future, or a ghost story, another marvel from the French man of mystery Jacques Rivette. The three actors far from being chastised by the playwright all end up quickly encamping at Clémont's ridiculously extravagant white classical mansion, apparently in Paris when we first see it, but with the sound of the sea evident in at least one later scene; it is a house on the borderlands between the conscious and unconscious, between the players and their roles. Soon Charlotte (Chaplin) and Emily (Birkin) are playing roles that we find are thinly veiled autobiographical elements in the playwright's life, and soon they seem to spin out of control emotionally and towards insanity, as do most of the other guests/actors/writers involved in the improbable scenario.

Filled with references to Dante (Virgil and Beatrice),mythology and early French history (Clovis) and the Zodiac which appears in mosaic form on the floor of the rotunda of Clémont's mansion, with sorcerers and premonitions of death, long-lost lovers who return at impossible moments, this is Rivette's most overtly magical and bizarre film since his pair of mystic genre films from 1976, "Duelle" and "Noroît", and like those films and much of the best of his work it is so long and complex that one viewing can hardly do it justice or suffice to touch more than a handful of its mysteries. Possibly the most significant of its literary/theatrical references is to Shakespeare, both in direct quotation (a minor character is translating Hamlet into Finnish and turns out - like many other characters) to speak flawless English and to know Shakespeare by heart),and in the references to Shakespearian acting conventions as both Emily and Charlotte at different times play the "pants" role.

It may also be the most self-referential film in an ouevre that is filled with films that spill over into each other, with clear nods to "Out 1", "Céline et Julie vont en bateau" and the two 1976 films, and many elements that point the way towards later theatrically-influenced and ghost-entranced works like "La Bande des quatres" and "Histoire de Marie et Julien". And like much of his best work, it is completely unpredictable and contains elements of comedy, tragedy, the surreal and farce mixing in such an elegant fashion that whether the film will end in madness, murder, love or friendship - or all of the above - remains impossible to guess until the credits roles.

A masterpiece, rich and complex and a film I will return to over and over....I'm only scratching the surface here.

I think the reason that Rivette is the least popular -- yet by far the most secret, profound and precious -- of the New Wave directors is that he can't be pinned down to a belief. He isn't political, though corporate conspiracies are a factor in many of his films; he isn't an occultist, though his films are filled with Zodiacal symbols, the tarot, magicians; he isn't interested in putting humans under the microscope like Rohmer, though he is minutely attentive to what breaks people apart and brings them together. No; rather, politics, the occult, and humanity are like the vines tying together the raft through which he floats in the void. They are methods to generate material, curiosity and, as lit students would say, a narrative where none necessarily exists. I hope I'm making this clear -- Rivette actually LONGS FOR a worldwide political conspiracy, preferably controlled by a dark magus operating from some deceptively plain apartment in Paris, with the whole human comedy under his spell, because he knows that the alternative, what most people call "reality," would be soul death. He wants more mystery, more confusion, more action. Unlike Godard, he isn't looking for utopias, certainly not those that can be brought about by politics; he wants the world to be as it is, in all its unfathomable, malevolent, messy beauty.

As Jean-Pierre Kalfon says in L'Amour Par Terre – one of Rivette's most insidious and fascinating films, by the way -- "I don't want to make life better than it is; I want life." Rivette, like many filmmakers who have disavowed their faith, has really only sublimated his religious quest. His obsession with the creative process, its false starts, abrupt detours and unknown destinations, is unmistakably of a spiritual nature. As it turns out, he is obsessed with stories because the world as we know it exists in order to contain them. For Rivette, God is not an obscure savior ( what are we being saved from? ) but a generator of fictional material, the ultimate creative artist. If the other world is defined by its permanence, its frozen perfection, this one must contain everything that can possibly exist, and the human artist, such as Rivette, then becomes like a sort of middleman between heaven and earth -- he gives form to the transitory, thus translating it for eternity.

Rivette's "strangeness" can be boiled down to his attempt to mirror God's mind by disavowing any ultimate truth. God requires stories in order not to be bored; stories require a world ruled by space and time where they can play out in a bounded setting, with a beginning and end; the world requires life in order to act out these stories. Stories, in short, require that we die. The two words that best describe Rivette's movies, "dark" and "childlike," come from the fact that, to accept that we are in a virtual, fictional realm, you must become as naive as a child for whom death is not real, yet who is subconsciously haunted by what it might mean. We die, but only because we're in a play. We die as children, but the curtain eventually rises ( he finally gives us a peek at what's behind it in his presumably final film, Marie et Julien. ) All this and more is part of why Rivette is so successful at blending the occult and the everyday – there is nothing more occult than the fact that we're here at all, pretending we know what we're doing.