Herb Shellenberger
htshell.org

Jacques Rivette's Le pont du nord (1982)
September 5 + 7, 2013
International House Philadelphia
Philadelphia, PA, US


Part of Directors in Focus: Jacques Rivette

"A puzzle, a hallucinatory cinephilic fever dream and a spellbinding, through-the-looking-glass thriller as only French New Wave titan Rivette could make, Le Pont du Nord plays like the darker, conspiracy-theory-obsessed cousin of the director’s beloved Céline and Julie Go Boating. This tale of two women follows ex-con Marie (Bulle Ogier), who is just out of prison, and Baptiste (Bulle’s real life daughter Pascale) for a surreal, labyrinthine odyssey through a wintry Paris, replete with mysterious clues, codes, traps, and spies." —BAM

“The ensuing journey is at once playful and tense, loaded with wry cine-references and propelled by an ebullient energy that suggests each new wrinkle of the plot were being dictated by a roll of the dice. (Like many of Rivette’s films, Le Pont du Nord was largely improvised by the actors.) Watching the film now, on the occasion of its first release in U.S. theaters, it seems more obvious than ever how much Rivette has influenced a subsequent generation of filmmakers—Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry—and expanded our sense of the possible.” —Scott Foundas, Film Comment

Le pont du nord, Jacques Rivette, 1981, France, 35mm, 129'

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