The Jacques Rivette Collection

Jacques Rivette is less well known than his fellow New Wave filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Eric Rohmer, but his career was just as resilient and interesting. The three films in this collection, never before released on home video in the U.S., present Rivette at his most idiosyncratic, with the first two being examples of the director's love of fabulism—creating worlds of myth and fantasy within a familiar material world. Noroît (1976), starring Geraldine Chaplin as a woman on a mission of vengeance against a vicious pirate queen (Bernadette Lafont), is a Jacobean drama that reworks the early 17th-century play The Revenger's Tragedy into a femme-centric pirate movie. Duelle (1976) begins as a murder mystery about a hotel clerk (Hermine Karagheuz) searching for a missing man and ends up as a battle between two capricious gods (a Sun spirit played by Bulle Ogier and an earthier Moon spirit played by Juliet Berto) searching for a magical stone. Both are odd films in which figuring out the stories and the motivations are part of the mystery. Rivette made two more films before he suffered from nervous exhaustion and took a break, returning with Merry-Go-Round (1981), which reworked ideas from the earlier films into a modern mystery of conspiracies, secrets, and a scavenger hunt of sorts, with Maria Schneider and Joe Dallesandro sent scurrying after clues to a dead man and the fortune he left behind. These surreal, enigmatic films are minor Rivette, of interest largely to aficionados, but they receive red carpet treatment here with new restorations and extras that include interviews with film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, Rivette, and actors, as well as a book with writings on the films. A strong optional purchase. (S. Axmaker)