*** DIVERTIMENTO
(A must-see) Directed by Jacques Rivette Written by Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, and Rivette With Michel Piccoli, Jane Birkin, Emmanuelle Beart, David Bursztein, Gilles Arbona, Marianne Denicourt, and the hand of Bernard Dufour.
Divertimento represents the fourth time in Rivette’s career that he’s carved two films out of the same basic material, and the third time this process has yielded a shorter, inferior, compromised version. In the 60s the producer of Rivette’s first lengthy feature, the 252-minute L’amour fou, demanded a version half as long– the version that premiered in Paris, which Rivette disowned. It’s not been made clear whether Rivette himself edited this version (which I’ve never seen), but it quickly dropped from sight after the four-hour version opened a little later and did substantially better at the box office.
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In 1970 Rivette shot 30 hours of footage for Out 1, and the following year edited them down into a 760-minute serial intended for–but rejected by–French TV; Rivette then spent the better part of a year editing the nearly 13-hour serial into a very different 255-minute feature, Out 1: Spectre. This is the only time he has ever managed to create two works of equivalent stature out of the same material–works that can even be said to complement and enhance each other, because the same shots sometimes have radically different meanings in the two films. (Broadly speaking, the serial is a comedy with tragic undertones, Spectre an anguished mystery with comic undertones; significantly, Rivette worked with different editors on the two versions.)
Very loosely adapted from Balzac’s novella The Unknown Masterpiece, the plot mainly concerns the intense interactions of two couples over a few days in the south of France, at a lovely village near Montpellier. A young artist (David Bursztein) vacationing there with his lover (Emmanuelle Beart) is taken by his dealer to meet an admired but long-inactive older artist named Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli), who lives in a nearby 18th-century chateau with his former model (Jane Birkin). After the five spend an evening together, Frenhofer decides to make another stab at his unfinished masterpiece, a canvas he calls La belle noiseuse, enlisting the young painter’s girlfriend as his nude model. By the end of the film, all four of these people and their relationships to art and life and to each other have been changed, and the abstract as well as concrete meanings of Frenhofer’s masterpiece have been comparably transformed.
The good news about Natural Born Killers is that it’s Stone’s first avant-garde film; unfortunately, that’s the bad news too. The fact that he currently has the power to do just about anything he wants as a moviemaker is certainly worth noting, but the fact that he uses this power to grind out something as truly awful as this delirious, monotonous feature-length music video should provide a cautionary lesson for filmmakers everywhere. If, as many people appear to believe, power is the ultimate value in contemporary Hollywood–it’s not what you do but what you have, and not what you say but what you show (and show off)–Natural Born Killers offers clinching evidence of just how boring the products of such a value can be. Every time I nodded off in this movie, it was with the secure knowledge that whenever I snapped to, I’d be in the same place.
Marx’s observation that history tends to repeat itself “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce” may help to account for the evolution from JFK to Natural Born Killers. One might have assumed, however, that the tragic myth Stone was aiming for in the first film and the satiric farce he’s attempting here would require somewhat different styles, but in fact most of Natural Born Killers looks like a parodic vulgarization and intensification of JFK. (“They liked it before, so maybe they’ll like it again.”) This time, however, Stone seems to be asserting that his helter-skelter montage is the channel-surfing equivalent of what the media as a whole is already doing. Of course, Natural Born Killers is supposed to be a deadly critique of the media, but that’s the kind of circular reasoning one has come to expect from the Hollywood virtual-reality bank–satire as celebration, or vice versa. This time, however, the degree to which Stone carries out this manic duplicity is much more staggering. It’s hardly a surprise to find him in the press book proudly ranking this movie on the subversion meter alongside Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange), Bunuel-Dali (Un chien andalou), Eisenstein (Potemkin), Swift, Voltaire, and even the Greek tragedians (for their “buckets of blood and gouged-out eyeballs”). Why Pee-wee Herman and William Blake didn’t make the final cut in this pantheon is a question well worth pondering.
