---

Easy binaries and simple classifications are more often than not a disservice to a form as possibility-expanding as cinema. This feels especially true when applied to Jacques Rivette’s disruptive Duelle (1976), a willfully unpindownable gambol of a movie whose mysteriousness and dream-like quality are hypnotic virtues rather than alienating setbacks.

Duelle seems to both take place in and be apart from our world. It lives in a here nor there zone. It’s set in modern-day Paris and features characters in a power struggle. But it’s a Paris that seems to exist, but probably doesn’t, in a painterly landscape. The drama is generally limited to seedy apartment buildings, green-lit subway stations, mirror-choked nightclubs, thorny gardens, aquariums after hours — places that, through Rivette’s collaging, quickly feel more otherworldly than recognizable, like approximations of Edward Hopper paintings seen through the eyes of a visiting alien.

And the principal characters, the more we get to know them, seem only to be humans in quotation marks struggling with problems in quotation marks. At first they strike us like luxury-store mannequins come to life. Played with bewitching inscrutability by Bulle Ogier and Juliet Berto, two beglammed women spend the entirety of the film scheming against each other for a mysterious rock they supposedly need to “stay on Earth.” It’s suggested that these women are not women, exactly, but corporeal manifestations of the Sun and the Moon, ever-aware that whoever is without the gem in their hand by a certain date will no longer be able to enjoy the Earthly pleasures to which they have become accustomed. 

Because you can’t help but look at them symbolically, sometimes this duo struck me like avatars for filmmaking itself: limitlessly manipulating with great power the mere mortals who get entranced by, and then caught up in, the mesmeric webs they have spun. As a director, Rivette has a similar restlessness. Duelle is a movie consistently rendering established aesthetics (particularly those of film noir) and narrative expectations suddenly unfamiliar. It keeps you at a distance with its impenetrable logic and out of time- and place-ness while also drawing you in. It’s you were standing in front of a portal to another realm, unable to enter but enticed by what can be seen from the other side. 

Describing a movie as dream-like has a staleness by now, but Duelle, at once familiar and foreign, earns the description.The only major difference is that you don’t have to write about it to remember it. Its images haunt.