Sécret Défense by Jacques Rivette (F 1998)
Sylvie Roussel wakes up in the middle of the night, goes into the kitchen, turns on the hypermodern faucet; she wants to drink a glass of water, but she tests the temperature, with her finger, pours the water back into the sink and waits until the water is cold enough. Sylvie Roussel is Elektra who has to take revenge for her father Agamemnon, together with her brother Paul/Orestes and who gets deeper and deeper into an intricate story of death and disaster, love, trust, and revenge. It is, varied only in details, the story of Elektra and Orest as told by the ancient tragedies.
The miracle which takes place in Rivette's films, which takes his films as its place, is always the same. He tells about young people (mostly women) in today's France and his films are full of the most subtle observations about everyday life, about human relationships - as in the great tradition of French cinema, which lives on today in the wonderful films by Noemie Lvovsky or Erick Zonca or Yolande Zauberman. At the same time, though, his characters and their fate are not of this world. There is always a second layer, right within the everyday experience, which irritates the banal action, or rather its banal reception, which turns the most normal into something strangely enigmatic. The point of reference of the stories, of which the audience becomes a witness rather than a spectator, is never any kind of realism or mimetism (the same thing is, though in a different way, true for Eric Rohmer's films) - but on the other hand it is also true that we, the witnesses, never get the key to the mysteries. They never add up to parable or allegory. There lingers a suggestion of deeper meaning, but it continually withdrawas. In a lot of Rivette's films this mystery circles around a never completely explainable conspiracies, sometimes perhaps mere imagination of the characters. Messages rather emerge than are sent that seem to hint to a secret connection of things (remember Balzac's 'Story of the Thirteen' in Rivette's most experimental, 13 hour film 'Out 1 - Noli me tangere'). Such pure referentiality without clear reference, such a McGuffin that turns the most concrete everyday things into something mysterious is this time supplied by the tragedy of Elektra. These backgrounds are not simply a question of citation, though, as one could think, trained by postmodernism, or a kind of structurization, which works exactly by the contrast of everyday life and reference to myth (take James Joyce's 'Ulysses'). The effect, in Rivette, is enchantment. Enchantment that does not give promises and yet lends another dimension to things, persons, dialogues, events, a dimension which to call simply mythic would be another simplification.
And yet there is a relation to myth. This time around, the Elektra story so obviously in the background, it can not be ignored. Rivette does not use myth, however, as a means to the ends of his film, he does not use myth to steal from the power of giving meaning it may still possess today. A lot of Hollywood movies do that (a rather successful example: The Truman Show and a stale one: Titanic, a film which Rivette with good reasons despises). Rivette rather empties myth, takes away all its meaning, its potential ways of meaning, and fills it again, detail by detail, dialogue by dialogue, move by move, enigmatic reference by enigmatic reference - but without reestablishing its old way of making (deeper) sense. There is no other word for this than (we have heard it more than enough, but here it is in its right place:) deconstruction. It is the fascination and unprecedented adventure of Rivette's films for the spectator to become the witness of this deconstruction of myths, which is completeley serious, not in the least ironic, which is modern and not postmodern, and which is, at the same time, full of suspense, as cerebral as sensuous, to become a witness with open eyes, open mind and open heart.
copyright (1999) by Ekkehard Knoerer
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