OUT 1 ssss
PRICE $30
RIVETTE: Because we didn’t succeed in finding a title. It’s without meaning. It’s only a label. –from a 1974 interview
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In most other ways, however, these four films couldn’t be more different. L’Amour Fou is a love story and psychodrama and Celine and Julie an eccentric fantasy-comedy. Out 1 and Out 1: Spectre are philosophical parables about solitude and community in and around Paris during the spring of 1970; they share the same source material, but Spectre’s tone is quite different–closer to nightmare than comedy, a poetic evocation of a frightening void rather than a void filled with people. For me they’re the most profound films ever made anywhere about the utopian dreams of the 60s and the disillusionment that followed.
Each of the serial’s eight episodes is titled as a relay between two characters, suggesting a chain of successive links: “From Lili to Thomas,” “From Thomas to Frederique,” “From Frederique to Sarah,” “From Sarah to Colin,” and so on. The explanation of who these people are is much of the story–and because their identities keep changing, we’re often confounded. Lili (Michele Moretti) and Thomas (Michel Lonsdale) are in separate theater groups, each preparing plays by Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes and Prometheus Unbound. Thomas is the director of his state-run company; Lili’s is an independent, directorless collective. Frederique (Juliet Berto) is a solitary working-class flirt who cons people out of money. Sarah (Bernadette Lafont) is a novelist working in a country house near the ocean (and an old pal of Thomas). Colin (Jean-Pierre Leaud)–a deaf mute who communicates with a harmonica–begs for money in cafes until a member of Lili’s collective, for no stated reason, hands him a slip of paper with an enigmatic message, and Colin, alone in his furnished room, undertakes to decode it.
