InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 9

KICKING THE CANON
After an introductory scene set in one of Constance's classes, the
film cuts to Cecile moving out of the shared living space to move
in with a boyfriend while Lucia (Inês de Medeiros), another acting
student, from Portugal, moves into her now unoccupied room.
After the women settle in, Anna attends a party where she meets
Thomas (Benoît Régent), a gregarious but mysterious man who
offers to drive her home. Things are going well, until Anna
realizes that Thomas already knows the way to the house,
despite the two having never met before, and she demands that
he pull over and drop her off. Thomas gradually becomes
involved with each of the women, ingratiating himself into their
lives under false pretenses while searching for a key left behind
by Cecile. What is the key for? What does it open? And who is
Thomas, really? Rivette teases these questions out for the entire
film, ultimately denying pat resolutions in favor of playful
ambiguity.
The two settings are connected by frequent scenes of a
commuter train coursing through the landscape, a kind of visual
metaphor for the characters moving from one world to the other.
While studying with Constance, the women rehearse scenes from
Marivaux's Double Inconstancy, as well as works from Racine and
Molière. Rivette invites one audience, the viewer, to share space
with another, the audience-within-the film, as we watch these
rehearsals stop, start, repeat, and reconfigure, a constant search
for some abstract concept of “truth” that eludes the women no
matter how hard they try. For her part, Constance seems mostly
unhelpful, her comments cryptic and harsh, occasionally leading
to a student breaking down into tears or storming off the stage.
Throughout all this, Rivette and Champetier move the camera in
a serpentine path, frequently framing the actors on a proscenium
before panning or dollying away to reframe their bodies or
turning 180 degrees to take in the audience in their seats (there
appear to be a dozen or so women in the class, although there
are only ever two on stage at any given moment). Over the course
of the film's generous 160-minute runtime, Rivette indulges in
many such sequences. As he was fond of saying, “the work is
always much more interesting to show than the result.”
Eventually, much of the action moves away from the theatrical
space to focus on Thomas' mysterious designs on the house and
its inhabitants. After trying unsuccessfully to seduce each
woman in turn, he eventually manages to win over Claude, which
allows him unfettered access to the house after their lovemaking
sessions. His search for the key has something to do with Cecile’s
boyfriend, a criminal who may or may not have been set up by
the authorities and whose trial plays out in brief snippets
occasionally glimpsed on the TV or overheard on the radio. Like
many Rivette films, the central mystery here is never fully
explicated; Thomas claims at different points to be a policeman,
a documents forger, and an artist. It will never be made explicit
which one of these identities is true, although it hardly matters.
The house itself is likewise ambiguous, recalling the film-withinthe-film
of Celine and Julie, a haunted space where a peculiar
psychodrama plays out (although Gang of Four is never as playful
or outright comedic as that earlier film).
Throughout the film, notions of playacting and performance spill
over from one space into the other, like a brief segment where
the women stage a mock trial of Cecile’s unseen boyfriend that
plays out like an improv session. Is he really guilty of anything?
We’ll never know, just like we don’t know exactly why Constance
is removed from her class by gruff-looking men who seem to
suspect her of a crime. It’s all acting, a game, an excuse for
Rivette to gather friends and collaborators and riff on a genre.
It’s his complete mastery that makes such a lark so intoxicating
to witness. Ultimately, the presence of the morally dubious
Thomas, a male interloper in an otherwise entirely femalecentric
world, brings the women closer together, cementing their
solidarity. As Mary Wiles writes, when the women rise up against
Thomas to save Cecile, “they retain control of the keys that
unlock their feminine potential and allow them to take control of
their lives and their art.” After Gang of Four, Rivette would return
to the theater after a long absence, as if the film rejuvenated
him. Great art has a way of doing that. — DANIEL GORMAN
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