Love on the Ground

Rivette does not simply borrow from himself in a lazy way as some seem to suggest about this film. As in Celine & Julie, there are two young women embarking on a mysterious adventure, largely played out in the strange and cavernous rooms of a mansion; as in most of his films, the backdrop is the theater, and themes of magic and the occult emerge. But it’s far from retreading old ground; instead, he begins from some of the same building blocks, in narrative and technique, to plunge on in new directions, to look back in again from different angles, to play the theme out to a radically reenvisioned conclusion. Rivette is only doing, in Fassbinder’s terms, what “every decent director” does: making the same film over and over. And for Rivette, theater is the only subject:

If you take a subject which deals with the theater to any extent at all, you’re dealing with the truth of cinema: you’re carried along. Because that is the subject of truth and lies, and there is no other in the cinema: it is necessarily a questioning about truth, with means that are necessarily untruthful. Performance as the subject.
-Jacques Rivette, 1968

Fifteen years later, these are still his concerns, and I’m realizing it is his quest toward this truth — or playing with truth until it becomes harder and harder to locate — that interests him; the finished film is always secondary. Because though the film may be finished, his thread has not been followed to its conclusion. Perhaps he plays with a theme as long as he can, and once all force has been wrung from it, he’s on to the next. I wouldn’t want to suggest I don’t think Rivette is a thoughtful editor, but more and more I find that what I am actually seeing is not a finished product but stages of an experiment.

So in the case of Love on the Ground, what begins as a remarkably intricate and tightly wound piece about — apropos of the theater, of course — identity and role-playing and projection, love and obsession, the creative process and the hold it takes on one’s reality — who pulls the marionette strings after all? Emily and Charlotte are young actors compelled to act out a playwright’s new work in his home for one night only — but it is scarcely fiction, which he owns almost from the start. “I don’t want to make life better than it is; I want life!” he says, perhaps perversely, as what he really wants is to see life reenacted, or perhaps resurrected. The conflation of identity between the two women, the playwright, an illusionist and various satellite figures from the present and past are so various, multi-directional and mind-blowing that the first hour and a half, and all the possibilities that might follow, are staggering. In true Rivettian fashion, all of this is exploded and unwound in the second half, with somewhat mixed results; here devilishly creative, there a drawn-out letdown. But importantly: little if anything is truly resolved.