increasingly drained and disillusioned
Cheers
The new 4K restoration of Rivette’s L’Amour Fou (1969/1972), playing now at Lincoln Center. The grand obsession of daring French filmmaker Jacques Rivette was life’s intersection with the artistic process, if not life’s intersection with story and fantasy altogether. It was a subject he’d revisit and revise throughout his career, and in L’Amour Fou as well as his Pynchonian opus Out 1 (1971) and The Gang of Four (1989), his attention was on how these themes played out within the dynamics of theater troupes. Out 1, released after L’Amour Fou’s completion, is alive with radicalism and ecstatic play, a free-jazz concert of a movie, a roulade of candy necklaces at a 13-hour rave. We only see a hint of such kineticism in L’Amour Fou, which in some respects makes the latter more interesting, if equally fou — to paraphrase the Desperate Bicycles, the medium here is tedium, the agony of stuckness. Rehearsals that are going nowhere, as the cast and crew grow increasingly drained and disillusioned. The play director’s marriage to the mentally ill actress Claire (an outstanding-as-always Bulle Ogier) breaking down and coming together and breaking down again, often in furiously different productive and destructive ways. I love how intuitive it all feels, how naturally the curveballs bend and just how long a crow can fly in one goddamn direction. Sometimes life is horribly cliché and then sometimes there’s a disturbance in the force, and Rivette honors the truth of both outcomes.
Jeers
I get so so so frustrated when I can’t figure out what someone’s thought process is for a dumb thing they’re doing. I’m not really a “driven by logic” kind of neurospicy but I do crave answers. I’m like one of those “Mommy, why is the sky blue? Why is water wet?” nagging kids except as an adult I can look up the facts and the rest of it is all self-directed and processed into an ever-churning anxiety. Call it a dysregulated nervous system begging for grounding.
It can be hard to accept that most of the time, there is no thought process. There’s no internal monologue. People stand at the top of the staircase and stare into their phones… because. People in indoor spaces who are chronically sneezing and coughing aren’t masked up to protect others… because. People leave their cart in the middle of the supermarket aisle and wander away… because. And yeah, it’s not lost on me that we’re in unprecedented unmitigated disasterscape yikestimes and the brainfog is EXTENSIVE, but I can’t help but be envious anyway of those who don’t have the little voice asking themselves how to make social transactions safe, calm, and smooth for everyone. To steer the chaos of modern life into a steadier state. My own quest for a psychological softgirl aesthetic, however, necessitates letting go a little.
