This is the seventh and final entry in a series covering the Lynch/Rivette retrospective at Lincoln Center, running from December 10 - 22. I attended a double feature of Inland Empire
(2006) and The Story of Marie and Julien
(2003) on the evening of Sunday, December 20. This review contains spoilers for both films.
The double feature will repeat, at 4:00pm on Tuesday, December 22, the final day of the retrospective.
Throughout the David Lynch/Jacques Rivette series we have seen characters blur together and switch places, sometimes literally - replacing one another through a miracle of space and time - but often more subtly, as they shift positions of power, experience each other's thoughts and feelings, or enter a mutual dream space. How appropriate that this final double feature rotates the directors themselves into one another's territory even if the changeover is far from complete.
Inland Empire still feels Lynchian and
The Story of Marie and Julien still feels Rivettian. But in significant ways, the two filmmakers evoke each other's fascinations, a quality especially true of
Inland Empire. Fascinated by the rehearsal process and the loss of identity inside an intense psychodrama, depicting a fluidity between worlds that go anywhere at any moment, and shot as experimentally as any Rivette film (Lynch invented random scenes the day of the shoot)
Inland Empire feels like a mash-up between the psychological/aesthetic intensity of
L'Amour Fou and the crosscutting narrative freedom of
Celine and Julie Go Boating.
The Story of Marie and Julien does not evoke Lynch as overtly as
Inland Empire evokes Rivette (although someone did describe the film to me as "Lynchian" before I saw it). However, there is an uncanny stillness and slowness to Rivette's work in
Marie and Julien that recalls Lynch's touch, especially in early works like
Twin Peaks that sought a mood of meditation - and occasional frustration - by drawing out moments as long as possible.
Marie and Julien also falls more readily into a genre than most of Rivette's work (all the better to subvert, my dear), recontextualizing a romantic ghost story just as Lynch recontextualized the road movie, film noir, or TV soap opera. Finally, perhaps most importantly, no Rivette film holds as much stock in the ability of faith and love to achieve the miraculous. Although Lynch himself drifted away from this viewpoint in the previous two selections (the fatalist
Lost Highway and tragic
Mulholland Drive),
Inland Empire fully returns to the transcendence of his earlier films, even more full-throated in its lack of ambiguous irony or bittersweet resignation. For the final night of a series that has probably highlighted differences more than similarities between the two auteurs, Lynch and Rivette find their sentiments strangely in sync - like clockwork.
