With my first film at the 76th International Cannes Film Festival, I had a quintessential Cannes Classics experience with the 1969 Jacques Rivette film L’Amour Fou, a 4+ hour French new-wave film that focuses on the slow decay of a marriage. L’Amour Fou throws its audience into a roller coaster of pent-up anger exhibited by a husband and wife fighting against each other, and is one of the most self-indulgent films I’ve ever seen.
The title translates to “Mad Love” and follows the relationship between Sebastien, a stage director, and his wife, Claire, an actress. At the beginning of the film, Sebastien is beginning his work on a new play and guiding Claire through her performance as one of his leads. But a power trip begins to take place as he makes the rash decision to fire her and change the trajectory of their relationship outside of the theater.
As Sebastien’s relationship with Claire becomes haywire among her confusion and inability to understand his intentions, the play gradually becomes more experimental and ultimately becomes practically nonsensical in its final version. The production design is entirely absent, leaving the actors to tirelessly bare their souls without any sense of grounding.
Sebastien keeps a cameraman and a mini film crew on the stage with him to record the performers while they’re rehearsing, The film becomes a bit meta in this aspect because it cuts to the actual 16mm footage that is being filmed by the actors portraying the film crew on the stage. At times, it reminded me of a mockumentary and its self-reflexivity by utilizing a fictional film crew within the context of the film itself. The transition from the grainier, high-contrast 16mm quality to the crispness of 35mm when we aren’t looking through the camera on the stage creates a jarring, trance-like effect that enraptures the audience in the chaotic mind of Sebastien as his play is collapsing in on itself.
Sebastien is also interested in incorporating nontraditional sound design into his production by including sporadic percussion instrumentation and having the players on the stage while the actors are performing. Sebastien chooses to include it into his play because he enjoys manically jamming on his dilapidated drum kit despite his lack of any musical ability. Despite it being purposefully off-kilter, it simply creates nothing but distraction and overabundance that takes away from the focus on the performances that the production of the play lacks.
Although we never get to see the play in its final form, the end of the film shows that Sebastien’s production has become something entirely unrecognizable from its original source material. The ways in which Sebastien perverses the medium of theater by making these additions to the production can be seen in parallel to the attitudes toward film that were entering the cultural zeitgeist of the French New Wave, particularly toward the end of its glory days in the late 1960s.
The French New Wave was similarly an era of experiments performed on the medium of film that had never been tested in such a way before, and would come to immeasurably influence world cinema, particularly with its ability to create style with fragmented, discontinuous editing styles.
The argument of the organic quality of the theater being “better than” film is one that persists to this day and has legs to it because there is a legitimate argument that could support it. Film inherently uses techniques of the medium such as picture and sound editing to craft something that isn’t naturally there and paves the way for experimentation with the form because of its malleability. L’Amour Fou represents this in a literal way by showing the obsessive nature of Sebastien into a representation of the ways in which the art of the theater has been depraved by integrating film techniques into a place where they don’t belong. The types of additions he makes to his production like the inclusion of his drums, and especially the use of the camera itself as a part of the performance on stage are the types of changes that are made to stage-to-screen adaptations.
Ultimately, L’Amour Fou is about the destructive power that the director, whether it be for film or for the stage, has over his actors and production, and the ways in which the hunger for this power can affect their personal life. When it comes to separating his control over his work and his romantic relationship with his wife, he is unable to do so in his moment of weakness by firing her from a professional artistic relationship that they have maintained up until that point. Sebastien gets carried away with this control over his play when he finds that he is inconsequentially able to make radical changes to the production. The limitless control he is able to exhibit during rehearsals begins to crossover into control over Claire in their romantic relationship as he emotionally and physically abuses her. His descent into madness comes from his inability to separate his personal life with the power trip that having full control over a production gives oneself. The power trip consumes him and blinds him to the effects it is having over his wife. It furthers the selfishness ingrained into the control that he seeks, which cannot be sustained in a relationship that requires the communication and responses from the other side.
Although I felt the slightest bit antsy during the film when it would feel its length, I look back on my experience with it more fondly than I expected to. I was in the presence of legends as the two leads, Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Kalfon, were sitting in the row right behind me. After decades of not having access to this seminal work, the magical skills of film preservationists brought together the complete edition of the film after it had been believed to be permanently lost to a fire. I cannot even begin to imagine the emotionally satisfying experience of being reconnected with one’s work after decades in the way that Ogier and Kalfan did that afternoon. In true Cannes fashion, the audience erupted into a thunderous standing ovation aimed at the teary eyed Ogier and Kalfan.