pzzow Perhaps a few of the above comments mights be useful if they were sure to not do these two things: 1.Admit up front that the only reason you attended a screening was because you always wanted to be seen at a film festival and because you happen to have a thing for an actress (what does her attire at the festival have to do with the film at all?)2.Admit that you didn't even make the effort to sit through the entire film.By doing these two things you immediately discredit yourself as a critic (casual or professional, it does not matter) and as a serious movie goer. Why don't you save such trivial opinions for Spielberg and Cameron movies, where people might care? When viewing a film from a director with Rivette's past, one can't expect light fair at a lightening pace. I suppose you expect an action film from Godard or Tarkovsky too? I will myself admit that it was not a fantastic film, but the reasons for which these others so unjustly scrutinize the film are the exact reasons that make it interesting. I personally could have watched Julien toy with his clocks and his cat "Nevermore" and Marie 'set up house' the entire two and a half hours. The territory that this film explores is the relationship between two individuals and how their own consciousness relates to the cinematic narrative through these relationships. Granted this topic of "the abyss" between two lovers or siblings is common fair in high-culture drama, yet it becomes nonetheless intriguing for the patient spectator in that it eventually dives into the terrain of low-culture genre film. The subject chosen by M. Rivette is expertly relayed through painstaking detail and precision, something absolutely necessary to it, and something that can only be accomplished after a lifelong devotion to the cinematic medium. If he had done this movie 30 years ago when he first started filming it, before giving it up until now--thats right folks and mindless commentators, 25 years before the movies its said to have ripped off--I'm not sure he would have created a similar film, one infused with a comparable, patient interrogation of human relationships and suffused with the same amount of warm compassion and empathy for his characters.

writers_reign This is the kind of film in which we are invited to indulge the director in return for the reward of fine performances/lush photography/gorgeous sets/haunting score, perm any three from four. In this case our indulgence is a tacit agreement not to wonder out loud just WHERE Julian gets the commissions to work on a series of outsize clocks in his home/workshop, or how he stumbled on the material with which he is blackmailing Madame X or indeed how anybody in the plot made the acquaintance of anyone else. Apart from Madame X and Marie he appears to have no other contact with anyone despite being middle aged and apparently well established in his large house/workshop. Trying to write a story like this must be like trying to drink from a collander so we badly need the compensation of the aforesaid fine acting, camera-work, score, etc. To some extent they are present and correct but I doubt they will be enough for the majority of viewers.

scotti2hotti This film was screened at the 2004 Melbourne International Film Festival. I have a fondness for French film and especially the babe-a-licious Emmanuelle Beart (even though the last film I saw of hers "Nathalie" was dreadful) so there seem to be enough reason to view The History Of Marie & Julien. An hour into the film, I was exiting the cinema (which is the first time in ages I've walked out on a film). Who knows, maybe the film came to life in the hour and a half I didn't watch. What I do know is this film was the single most boring film I'd seen during the festival. Instead of being a ponderous, pseudo-intellectual and glossy piece of cinema you'd find between the pages of a coffee table book, maybe someone should have written a decent script.

gorbman The thing that has always been interesting about Rivette is the different sense of time that he creates through a more slowly developed story, spanning 2-4 hours on screen. Then when a real development comes along, it's such a surprise and pleasure (dare I say "as in real life?"). MARIE AND JULIEN has a mysterious story, but it's not suspenseful--you can guess what's going on fairly early into the film. Pleasure lies in getting to know the characters, watching Marie arrange a room, watching Julien take a clock apart and put it back together--and having your suspicions about the story verified. It's all perhaps more like reading a novel than watching a normal Hollywood film characterized by a tightly formulaic, time-bound 90-minute plot. And it's no accident that Julien is a clock repairman: that big clock he dismantles seems to stand for the very method and structure, and sense of duration, of this wonderful movie. A clock's ticking is supposed to be even, "in beat," but it's interesting too when the ticking is uneven!