Merry-Go-Round (1981)
Directed by Jacques Rivette

Film Review

Watching Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker and Jacques Rivette's Merry-Go-Round back-to-back (as one occasionally does whilst contemplating the meaningless of existence and the paucity of good films these days) it is hard not to be struck by the eerie, accidental similarity between the two films. Made at almost exactly the same time, by two equally free-spirited auteurs (one an esteemed maverick of Soviet cinema, the other a cherished relic of the French New Wave), the films both depict a quest but they end up being something far more profound.  The most tangible similarity between these two films is that they both had a fraught production and came very close to being abandoned midway through filming.  But whereas Tarkovsky's film is now hailed as an unequivocal masterpiece, possibly the greatest film of the Soviet era, Rivette's film is mostly overlooked and considered a lesser work, even by the director's most ardent admirers.  Only by watching it straight after Stalker do you appreciate how great a film Merry-Go-Round is - although watching these two films in one sitting does take a certain amount of stamina (not to mention caffeine).

Merry-Go-Round is certainly not Rivette's most accessible film, but it has a quality (chaos tempered by lunacy) that makes it weirdly compelling.  Never one to bother much with plot, Rivette starts out with the flimsiest of storylines - a search for a missing girl who may or may not be alive and a fortune that may or may not exist - and uses this as a pretext to eavesdrop on the evolving relationship between two completely different characters - an American drifter named Ben and a hard-to-pin-down French girl named Léo.  Given that most of the film was improvised, it's hardly surprising that the plot quickly becomes unfathomable, with secondary characters appearing and disappearing at the drop of a hat, contradicting or confusing much of what has gone before.  Much as we may wish it, none of the pieces fit together, but that doesn't stop us trying to make a picture out of them.  As in Tarkovsky's film, we are compelled to try to make sense of something that inherently has no sense, and in doing so we learn something about ourselves.

This was the film that Rivette had most difficulty with.  He was obliged to make it to conclude a contractual agreement with the backers of Scènes de la vie parallèle, a series of four films that he was unable to complete.  Rivette had completed the first two films - Duelle (1976) and Noroît (1976) - and was just a few days into filming the third - Marie et Julien - when he succumbed to a nervous breakdown.  It was a year before he could begin work on his next film, Merry-Go-Round, and this would consume over two years of his life.  It all began when the actress Maria Schneider contacted Rivette and asked if he would be interested in making a film with her and Joe Dallessandro, with whom she was friendly at the time.  The lure of working with two of the biggest sub-culture icons of the 1970s (one made famous by Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, the other a star of Andy Warhol's films) must have been too strong to resist, so Rivette accepted Schneider's offer, only to regret it once filming got underway.

The strain of Rivette's improvisational approach to filmmaking doubtless hastened the deteriorating relationship between Schneider and Dallessandro, and the lead actors soon became antagonistic towards one another.  Both suffering from chronic ill health, Rivette and Schneider were ready to walk away from the project but were persuaded to stay the course by the cast and crew.  In the end, Schneider had to call it a day and some of her scenes (the cutaway sequences depicting Léo pursuing Ben in the woods) were filmed with another actress, Hermine Karagheuz, who had appeared in Rivette's earlier film Out 1 (1971).  The film's chaotic production and off-screen battles are reflected in what finally ended up on the screen, after two years of exquisite hell.

Given what Rivette and his cast had to go through to finish the film, it's amazing that Merry-Go-Round stands up as well as it does, and it's hard to fathom why, on its first release, the critics were so dismissive of it.  The film serves as a bridge between the surreal oddity that is Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974) and the strange metaphysical thriller Le Pont du Nord (1981) - indeed, together these three films form a triptych that is much more than the sum of its parts.  Merry-Go-Round is the most ambiguous of the three films, and the most challenging.  Woven into the main narrative, in which long-haired babe magnet Ben fails to hit it off with aloof French girl Léo as they take part in a bizarre treasure hunt, are increasingly bizarre cutaways in which one of the protagonists is mercilessly hunted across countryside by the other.  In one of these, Léo sends a pack of wild dogs after Ben; in another, Ben is pursued by a knight in shining armour; later, Léo is attacked by snakes on a stretch of beach.  And, just to make things even weirder, the narrative occasionally breaks off altogether to show us two musicians - bass-player Barre Phillips and clarinettist John Surman - improvising the film's soundtrack.

You expect, at some point, that all these disparate elements will magically come together and create a satisfying whole, leaving you with the comforting feeling you get once you have worked your way to the end of a murder mystery novel.  Of course, this being a Jacques Rivette film, you'd have to be mad to wish for such a thing.  Far from being given a nice tidy resolution, we are left in a state of total perplexment, unsure which part (if any) of what we have seen is real, and what lies in the realm of the imagination.  Only the final sequence - the most enigmatic and most perfect ending of any of Rivette's films - feels real.  The rest is illusion, an excursion into that strange parallel existence that we visit only in our dreams.  Is it so easy to tell dreams and reality apart in real life?  Merry-Go-Round has you wondering...

Film Synopsis

Ben, a young American, and Léo, a young French woman, meet at an airport in Paris.  They had been hoping to meet up with Léo's sister Elisabeth, who is also Ben's girlfriend, but she is mysteriously absent.  Following a series of strange messages from the missing woman, Ben and Léo finally trace her and discover that she knows the whereabouts of the four million dollars that her father, David Hoffman, stole two years previously, before he was supposedly killed in an aeroplane explosion.  Elisabeth's father is apparently alive and well, but before she can reveal any more she is abducted.  Ben is surprised to find that a former girlfriend of his is mixed up in the affair - she was apparently David's mistress and has the key to his Swiss bank account...