I saw this in memory of Jacques Rivette who passed away the other day, a wandering soul who paved the way for so many cinematic walks.Here he retraces steps he had already taken before, two girls daydreaming a life of adventure around Paris in Celine and Julie, a grid of fictions and elusive conspiracy unfolding across the city as he favored since his very first. There are watchers throughout the city, a satchel full of newspaper clippings - stories within stories - and a map that points at symbolic reality.The deliberate obliqueness - the daydreamed sense - is of course always Rivette's tool of suspending burdensome logic but we don't really cross beyond here to something alive, we spend a bit too much time stuck in the map. He traces these steps without the freshness of a first time, without making his way finally to a clearing that will open up a sense of meaningful horizon.The part that captivates me is the one that echoes Celine and Julie. Two girls once more, one reading from a book and summoning the other, brash one as her fairy guide in a world of fictions and rituals, both of them lovely. It's the sense of reverie in the walking around; for Rivette - a cinematic flaneur - the city has to be walked in order to yield its insight. The insight is in the train tracks that lead out, atop the Arc, in the construction developments at the outskirts of Paris where, now at the outskirts of fiction, the world is a mass of gaping and colorless structures. It's one of the most roaming films.The last scene is a container on its own right for Rivette's purpose and unlocks the whole; a mock karate fight where the opponent is unseen, there are set motions and steps to take, it accomplishes really nothing, except the fictional enactment loosens up the spontaneous experience of playing in this way, which can only take place because story has been exhausted and we have finally arrived at the end of the maze. Or is it the shape fiction takes when unburdened anymore by any plot about money? Or does it escape from the fact that someone has just been murdered? In the French semiotic sense these mean one and the same, layers of an onion.

Alright, this must be said: as difficult as they are to see in many countries, the series of films Rivette made from "Amour Fou" to "Merry Go Round" are some of the most amazing, magisterial works of that decade, of all time even. "Le Pont Du Nord" is at the tail end of this streak, and is a minor achievement in comparison. However.Even minor Rivette is fascinating, and the prospect of a female Quixote traveling through a late 70s Paris in a period of destruction/reconstruction, with call backs to the radical '60s (and a sly nod to Fassbender's "Third Generation"), and a score by Astor Piazzola, is enough to make anyone excited. There is something else, too, that I have not seen much commented on; the friendship between the two female leads, related as they were in real life, is a genuine pleasure to watch, and exists somewhere other than acting as we are used to thinking of it. Generally recommended, for fans of the director and the performers,I would say very strongly recommended, no hesitation.

Rivette in minor, self-imitative mode (echoes of "Duelle" and "Celine et Julie vont en bateau"), exploring one of his usual obsessions - a suspected vast conspiracy, uncovered and struggled against by glamorous looking women. Carelessly plotted and filmed (the boom makes frequent appearances at the top of the frame, and one wishes that the clangorous "natural" soundtrack had been cleaned up, at least of traffic noise), the film's best aspect is the Parisian setting - here, a city seemingly under assault by developers - many of the locations are in a state of decay, transition or destruction - this is not the Paris seen either by tourists or in most movies. As Marie LaFee (Bulle Ogier) has just been released from a year's sentence, she finds it impossible to breathe when she enters an interior; hence, there is not a single indoor shot in the movie (apart from a brief elevated train trip, and a night spent in a parked car - and even these are open to the outdoors). After encountering Baptiste (Pascale Ogier) three times (according to Baptiste: once is accident, twice is chance, three times is fate), Marie pairs up with this strange young woman who fancies herself as Marie's protector from the all-seeing "Maxes" (spies who are everywhere). Marie encounters her former lover Julien (Pierre Clementi) and the two women deduce (from a briefcase full of newspaper clippings, and a map of Paris divided into 64 segments) that he is involved in some sort of conspiracy; all three are followed by a threatening, but ineffectual, "Max" (Jean-Francois Stevenin). There are elements of fairy tales (the lions, the "dragon" in the playground) and sci-fi (the "eyes" which Baptiste feels compelled to slash, the spider web), but, despite the pervasive humorlessness, it's hard to take this movie seriously. The whole thing seems like a silly trifle, concocted primarily for the amusement of the participant's - especially at the end, when Rivette seems to abandon the film completely and simply keeps the camera rolling on a martial arts lesson between two of the actors.Still, worth seeing for Paris and the always wonderful Bulle Ogier. Rivette is never uninteresting, even when he's not entirely successful.Seen March 27, 2007 at Florence Gould Hall at the French Institute, NYC.

This is one of the most fascinating films I've ever seen. Since then, I became a serious devotee of the director Jacques Rivette, the most important filmmaker among late/post nouvelle vauge other than Eric Rohmer. While borrowing the main two characters from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, they are trailing the city as if they were exploring inside the shell of a snail, which the city is actually constructed. The film shows you amazing scenery of Paris, absolutely not in a touristic sense. In this film, Bulle Ogier co-worked with her daughter Pascale Ogier, who played the heroine in "Les Nuits de la pleine lune" by Eric Rohmer, another unforgettable film and suddenly passed away at the age of 24, right after the film was released.