Hurlevent (Rivette, 1985): ICA Cinema, 5.15pm
This 35mm screening is part of the Jacques Rivette season at the ICA. Full details here.
Slant website review:
Ostensibly an adaptation of the oft-filmed Wuthering Heights, Jacques Rivette’s Hurlevent (or Howling Wind,
per the translation) feels more like a schematic indication of Emily
Brontë’s famed novel, though that should not be taken as a criticism.
This is one of Rivette’s most stripped down works; emotion is secondary
to the film’s tight and taut surface (updated to the Cévennes
countryside circa the 1930s) where passions flare imperceptibly and a
romantic tragedy is performed as if preordained, though this is more
than just Céline and Julie Go Boating’s
haunted house melodrama played straight. Rivette’s characters are often
held captive by the stage (whether real or imagined), so when Catherine
(Fabienne Babe) and her farmhand lover Roch (Lucas Belvaux) run through
the fields adjacent to an imposing stone homestead (one of the film’s
two primary settings), there is a profound sense of meta liberation, of
escape beyond the boundaries of narrative (the wind-strewn leaves of
grass, counterpointed by the incantatory vocalizations of the Bulgarian
choir Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, might very well be located in the
empty margins of the Book of Life). Certain of Rivette’s weaker films
assume a window-dressed Christian pose (anxiety of influence, I think,
from Hitchcock and Rossellini, among others), but here the spiritual
inquiry is entirely genuine. The three dream sequences that
near-invisibly signal Hurlevent’s beginning, middle, and end
are as much a holy trinity as they are a thematic backbone; the
characters wake from these becalmed and psychologically penetrating
visions into a nightmarish reality of Escher-like doorways and windows
that lead them over a prolonged and circuitous path to destruction.
Rivette never concretely illustrates the divide between mind and matter
(the blink-of-an-eye passage of three years feels particularly
apocalyptic in this context) and that allows him to have it both ways
when, in Hurlevent’s finale, the spirit world quite literally
breaches the real world, an action that manages to have repercussions at
once miraculous, damning, and devastating.
Keith Uhlich
Here (and above) is an extract.
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