Early in Jacques Rivette’s Love on the Ground three actors—Charlotte (Geraldine Chaplin), Emily (Jane Birkin), and Silvano (Facundo Bo)—stage a bedroom farce inside a Paris apartment about a man attempting to hide his two lovers from one another. Though performing for an audience, Charlotte and Emily find that they’re inadvertently auditioning for the play’s author, Clément Roquemaure (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), who offers them roles in his latest drama, which is based on his real life and the romantic entanglements that consumed it.
Upon arriving at the man’s chateau, where the play is to be rehearsed and performed, Charlotte and Emily find the place filled with brightly colored rooms and dense décor, as well as the presence not only of Clément but his friend and possible romantic rival, a magician named Paul (André Dussollier). The vaguely mystical nature of Clément’s manse and the role-playing that Charlotte and Emily engage in naturally invites comparison to Rivette’s own Celine and Julie Go Boating. But where that metatextual masterpiece foregrounded its main characters’ assertion of their control over a narrative into which they’ve been dropped, Love on the Ground reasserts the primacy of the auteur that Rivette’s films had previously undermined.
Clément carefully directs his actresses, and soon Charlotte and Emily begin to behave less as independent human beings than vessels for the playwright’s hang-ups and unresolved longing. Rivette matches this narrative focus on male-centric, egotistical auteurism with a formalism that’s more classical in nature than the shaggy, almost unpredictable aesthetic that defines his improv-heavy ’70s films. The coarse 16mm images of many of those works have been replaced with lush 35mm images shot on cameras that remain mounted on tripods, cranes, and carts.
The film’s images are composed with a geometrical precision, with William Lubtchansky’s camera gliding alongside Charlotte and Emily as they amble around their environments, all the while emphasizing their sense of entrapment within florid chambers. Love on the Ground deliberately lacks the spontaneity and sense of visual discovery that defines Celine and Julie Go Boating, instead drawing its energy from its exacting compositions and how they seem to slowly shrink the space around its female figures (Chaplin and Birkin as much as Charlotte and Emily), and to the point that the film comes to feel gripped by a kind of Buñuelian madness.
That same formal rigor, though, also calls attention to this nearly three-hour film’s many longueurs, which not only feel longer than the ones that fill earlier Rivette films of equal or greater length but also want for more surprises. Charlotte and Emily increasingly feel the stress of realizing Clément’s vision and grow more aggressive as a result, but the film’s narrative stakes lack for a corresponding sense of escalation. Perhaps inevitably, Love on the Ground feels stuck in a loop—at least until its final hour, when things pick up as the women start to inhabit their roles to such a volatile extent that they start to experience visions. This prefigures a climactic performance that erases the borders between the play’s artificiality and the reality on which it’s based, reaffirming Rivette’s belief in cinema stretching the traditional limits of theater.
Image/Sound
The saturated colors of the film’s decorous interiors look resplendent on Cohen Media Group’s disc, especially when contrasted with the more muted colors of the characters’ clothing. Exterior scenes highlight the verdant shades of well-tended gardens and the slight day-for-night blues of the color grading. Detail is consistently clear and no print damage is visible. The lossless stereo is similarly clean, evenly distributing the clean and clear dialogue across all channels.
Extras
Cohen’s disc comes with a commentary track by critic and programmer Richard Peña, who extensively breaks down the film’s aesthetic choices and themes.
Overall
Jacques Rivette’s beguiling, minor-key manor mystery receives a solid Blu-ray from Cohen.
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