Jacques Rivette’s Secret Defense feels in many ways like a culmination—a filmmaker’s ideologies and obsessions distilled to a perfect essence. Sandrine Bonnaire stars as Sylvie, a medical scientist who discovers that her father’s death five years prior might not have been accidental. Reduced to the level of genre, the film could be characterized as a revenge thriller, with Sylvie murderously seeking out her father’s former business partner, Walser (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), after her brother, Paul (Grégoire Colin), produces a supposedly damning photograph that implicates this Mabuse-esque entrepreneur as his killer.
Yet the photo retains an unhealthy ambiguity. Like a similarly “damning” line of dialogue in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, its meaning differs from person to person. At heart, the picture proves nothing concrete, but its implications are poisonous nonetheless. Rivette doesn’t merely flip his characters’ switches; he allows time to pass, lets the virus settle in. We observe Sylvie’s routine and, in the process, we get a sense of her world—a Paris subsumed by distorting and dissociative technological advances. Even voices on the other end of a telephone possess an eerie and unnerving clarity.
It’s no mistake that Sylvie is shown searching for a cure to an unspecified cancerous ailment. Little does she realize that she herself has been infected with an age-old disease: the desire for absolute knowledge. Rivette and co-screenwriters Pascal Bonitzer and Emmanuelle Cuau reportedly based Secret Defense on the tragedy of Electra, and the film does have the arc and insight of a great Greek myth. Indeed, the film’s final images—which first shatter and then reclaim a quite literal proscenium—suggest that this is both theater and cinema simultaneously, so how fortunate to have a performer as capable as Bonnaire at the center of it all.
Equally adept whether in close-up or long shot, Bonnaire navigates Rivette’s mise-en-scène with a near-imperceptible dexterity. Among her many bravura moments, perhaps the finest ones occur during the extended train set piece (locomotives it would seem are second only to cats on Rivette’s list of outward preoccupations) where Sylvie travels to the countryside to kill Walser. It’s as distressing a rail journey as the one that closes out Naruse Mikio’s Yearning, with Bonnaire (a Gallic complement to Takamine Hideko) expertly delineating Sylvie’s attempts to distract herself from the task at hand. She sits silently, orders a drink, rebuffs a fellow passenger’s stares, and nervously paces just to the edge of courting suspicion.
Action—or its lack—defines Sylvie’s turbulent state of mind: When the gun she conceals finally goes off, killing an unintended target, it’s less a release than a self-inflicted wound that ushers her interior confusion to the pale and pallid surface. Poisoned by an ambiguous image, she forces her amorphous desire for revenge into a reality that cannot contain it. Actions have consequences (as some diseases cannot be cured): Sylvie’s decision not only strips away her protective sheen of complacency, revealing the sickly layers of guilt underneath, it also points the way—totally, terribly, tragically—to her inevitable demise.
Image/Sound
The vivid colors of William Lubtchansky’s cinematography practically jump off the screen on this 4K restoration. The navy blues of doors and other objects are rendered in all their depth and complexity, often fading into near blackness in the background, without losing clarity, while bursts of red and green positively glow compared to the off-white tones of many of the film’s interiors. The lossless stereo track could pass for a surround-sound presentation, so enveloping are the ambient noises of street noise and the rustling of wind in the countryside, while off-screen speakers’ voices are just as clear as the dialogue of visible characters.
Extras
As with Cohen Media Group’s recent releases of Gang of Four and Love on the Ground, Secret Defense comes with an exhaustive commentary by film programmer Richard Peña, who highlights how Rivette’s brazenly cinephilic direction of this film compare to the more sui generis work that made the filmmaker famous. Peña also calls attention to the ways that Rivette upends the usual film grammar of the thriller to avoid first-person psychoanalysis in favor of a more distanced, objective study of his characters’ madness.
Overall
Cohen adds another entry into their rolling home-video tribute to Jacques Rivette’s work with a beautiful transfer of the filmmaker’s intoxicating anti-thriller.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
