Secret Defense (1998)

 

Director: Jacques Rivette

Screenplay: Pascal Bonitzer, Emmanuelle Cuau and Jacques Rivette

Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire as Sylvie Rousseau; Jerzy Radziwilowicz as Walser; Grégoire Colin as Paul; Laure Marsac as Véronique / Ludivine; Françoise Fabian as Geneviève; Christine Vouilloz as Myriam

Canon Fodder

 

Secret Defense is what would happen if you took an Alfred Hitchcock thriller and brought it fully into real world ramifications. Here, Sylvie (Sandrine Bonnaire) learns from her brother that their father's death, though to have fallen on railway tracks, may have not been an accident, linked to former associate Walser (Jerzy Radziwilowicz). Deciding instead of said brother to go with a firearm, the consequences of violence are great, as the truth of what transpired in the past is brought to the surface, and an innocent is killed, forcing the grim weight of guilt to be felt by Sylvie along the way.

In the spectrum of New Wave directors, you have Jean-Luc Godard at one side eventually becoming even more radical than even when he started, François Truffaut held as the most traditional, and everyone in the group finding their trademarks. Among them, Rivette is fascinating in how his is between both the most radical members of that movement - Out 1 (1971) to Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) playing with the length and style of storytelling - yet also someone who does focus on narratives greatly with his script collaborators, Pascal Bonitzer working with him from the eighties onwards to the end of his career. Secret Defense is very graspable in its narrative, very easy to be drawn into as a genre premise, yet spanning nearly three hours with the dynamic being the repercussions of these events, the banality of the world including all the issues surrounding what these characters' histories are but also the time in-between. When contemplating the act of revenge, Sylvie even getting to the stage to kill her father's murderer leads the viewer and her to experience the long train ride to his countryside home, sobering herself up at the train's bar and the sense of preparation there. Hesitating, an innocent is killed by her, and acting out perfectly by Sandrine Bonnaire, the remorse and horror is lingering, including the strange Stockholm Syndrome scenario she ends up with in afterwards with Walser, both perversely sympathetic in helping her but near to almost dominating her now she has failed shooting him. The thriller switches to a drama as the point of the death, her father's death, becomes more complex itself.

Slow burn, it could sound crass to say this film is shot and composed calmly as one could say of a lot of French cinema from this era like a homogenised mass of filmmaking from this era into the 2000s, focused on dialogue, natural real locations in urban and rural French areas, emphasis on one huge name in the cast in Sandrine Bonnaire common for me among them. Yet this was a time for cinema, among other moments before and afterwards in style, where this staple aesthetic format was so common it lead to interesting results to more of these films I see. So many titles follow a similar aesthetic style, sold literally by distribution companies like Artificial Eye in the UK (who sold Secret Defense on DVD) as their meat and potatoes, yet also had countless fascinating figures within it like Rivette or Raul Ruiz with Comedy of Innocence (2000) who helped add their own slants to this template. As a mass of French world cinema, it brings up reoccurring tropes of note with many of these films, like Secret Defense, being about middle class France that is full of individuals full of neurosis, skeletons in their closets, and with these films unpicking at issues within these groups despite the gentle elegance of even their living rooms.

A strong independent woman who works as a scientist, working on something as singular as medical cell research, Sylvie is nonetheless dragged into an abstract concept of human thought, not tangible but with us for centuries, called revenge. Middle class here is fraught with undisclosed secrets and distant families as her mother is uncomfortable conspiring with Walser, the man behind the murder of her father, who whilst his moral spectrum in the end becomes more complex, is still frankly a womanising sleaze for all his virtues. Revelations expose family skeletons, as it brings in the suicide of Sylvie's older sister. A trait of Rivette's magical realist period, between Celine and Julie... and Duelle (1976), even appears in how the accidental victim of Sylvie, played by Laure Marsac, has a sister never mentioned as being a twin but is also played by Marsac, one introduced who Walser to replace his secretary immediately begins to woo. Even class itself is reared up as, with a childhood friend to Sylvie's working as Walser's maid, there is still the divide that, when he wishes her out, she is out off from this drama even with an intimate friend barely able to hide the trauma of her killing and the weird tension around Walser they have.

Even in mind to my homogenisation theory of certain French cinema, Jacques Rivette was a director of a quiet aesthetic in spite of his layering narratives or stretching beyond three hours with many of his films. He was not someone who relied on elaborate editing or huge aesthetic affect. In fact what makes his work distinct too is how he draws his elaborate narratives genre into a grounded world, such as Celine and Julie Go Boating being a magical realist romp, involving magical sweets that let one see a bizarre purgatorial drama, set in real mid-seventies France. Here as well, the ordinary world of Parisian environments tones and shapes this thriller premise, banality first with the thriller plot intertwined and not from visa versa where as Alfred Hitchcock himself did with humour and/or added tension.

Even how Rivette, in the little music here, ends on medieval classic music on the end credit, an odd choice at first, makes sense as barring firearms, this narrative would be the same in Arthurian tropes of knights or set even in an older ancient time, where accidentally killing the wrong person is just the beginning of the vicious cycle of revenge and death that closes the film out even if things are covered up. Revenge is a sticking point which, here, where even the context for why is it desired should be questioned. An obscure work for Rivette nowadays, which is ironic knowing very accessible the film is for outsiders to his cinema, Secret Defense is a compelling narrative work in mind to this and its exceptional virtues.