Jacques Rivette, a French director whose challenging and often enigmatic work was revered by film aficionados, died on Friday at his home in Paris. He was 87. He had Alzheimer’s disease, said his longtime producer and friend, Martine Marignac, reports The New York Times.
His death was confirmed by the French culture minister, Fleur Pellerin, who on Twitter called him a filmmaker “of intimacy and loving impatience.”
Mr. Rivette never achieved the celebrity status of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, his fellow members of the group of French critics turned filmmakers that became known as the New Wave. But he always had his colleagues’ respect — Mr. Truffaut once admiringly called him “the most fanatic of all of our band of fanatics” — and he did enjoy some commercial success.
Probably his most successful film was one of his later ones, “La Belle Noiseuse” (1991), a loose adaptation of Balzac’s “Le Chef-d’oeuvre Inconnu” about the intense complicity that grows between a painter (Michel Piccoli) and a young woman (Emmanuelle Béart) who agrees to pose nude for him. The film’s demanding running time, nearly four hours, was typical for Mr. Rivette, who enjoyed exploring and exploding the limits of conventional movie storytelling, although its relatively transparent theme, the give-and-take between life and art, was not.
More representative was “Céline and Julie Go Boating” (1974), a critically praised excursion, more than three hours long, in the company of two contemporary Parisiennes, a magician (Juliet Berto) and a librarian (Dominique Labourier). The two are drawn to a mysterious house where, their imaginations aided by magic candy, they witness an unfolding Edwardian melodrama involving a lonely widower (Barbet Schroeder) and a pair of conniving women (Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier).
Art and life are on the docket here as well, but the relationship between the two is shifting and complex. And it is by no means clear, at any given moment, whether the visitors are imagining the residents of the house or vice versa.