A secret society, blackmail, robberies, persecutions throughout Paris, murders... without a doubt, all this seems very promising.
Very long exercises and rehearsals by two amateur theater companies, in which the actors babble, crawl on the ground, stretch, grope each other, go into strange trances... possibly this may not be so promising.
Paris 1970, colorful characters, lazy, idle, with crazy behaviors, outlandish and impossible clothes, often scruffy, getting high on biscuits and jam, sitting on the floor in rickety apartments, planting their boots on the duvets, drinking and smoking non-stop, with nothing to do but no time or desire to prepare a moderately cooked meal... possibly we expect a lot of post 68 nostalgia.
Rivette mixes all of this together, works his magic, and the result is nothing we could have expected, or rather something we inadvertently wished some director would discover, but had never been shown. It is a new cinema.
The first chapter is an alternation of theatrical exercises by two amateur companies that intend to put on The Seven Against Thebes and Prometheus in Chains (but the truth it could be anything). Very 70's theater, you know, Grotowski and all that. A lot of discovering oneself, freeing oneself, gymnastic gestures, scenarios that look like tatami mats and all that stuff. The question of who can play the role of Prometheus is a secondary detail to which no allusion is made. In our bourgeois mentality, we have the question of how these people earn their bread, really, because many of them don't seem to have another job. These group exercises are between the ridiculous and the fascinating, and are interrupted by the images of two highly individualized characters: Frédérique and Colin, who represent an absolute contrast: picaresque and picturesque, their environment is the street, but they seem to belong to another reality.
And from here on these theatrical rehearsals of a group of actors alternate, fully realistic characters, who invent a reality in their exercises and come to inhabit their collective fantasies, alternate with scenes outside the theater, where we have some eccentric characters and absurd, often behaving in an absolutely delirious manner in scenes shot à la cinema verité, where passers-by stare at them strangely.
In the second chapter the rehearsals continue, but we are no longer just facing two groups, but we are getting to know the members inside and outside the rehearsal rooms, how they meet other characters and begin to speak ambiguously and with a certain mystery about their relationships with other people. On the other hand, Frédérique and Colin interrupt more frequently, with their crazy, irritating, absurd and funny behaviors, and with their incongruous appearance, the still preponderant scenes of the theater groups.
From the third chapter on, the existence of an ambiguous and mysterious society, the Thirteen, is superimposed on this reality of Parisian bohemia, an idea taken from the novelistic world of Balzac, and this society permeates what we have seen so far. Colin and Frédérique, misfits and loners, are in charge of discovering what this association is, what its goals are or were, and who its members are.
The characters do not have a great psychological content, they are hidden from us very often, they are not explained to us at all, but in the Rivette way, thanks to masterful actors with a great and marked personality, and to the fact that they mostly seem to improvise their dialogues and behaviors, they are absolutely real, and they live beyond their traditional cinematographic function of being captured by the camera and participating in a plot.
The importance of the actor and his own personality as an actor is paramount. It is clear that we do not have, for example, an absurd and lazy young man who earns his living by posing as a deaf-mute, but Jean-Pierre Léaud playing an absurd and lazy young man posing as a deaf-mute.
And Rivette has a cast of incredible actors: not only the great personalities and regulars of French cinema from the 70s: Bulle Ogier, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bernadette Lafont, Juliet Berto, Françoise Fabian or Michael Lonsdale; or the much lesser known but great Michèle Moretti or Hermine Karagheuz, but rather the entire set of characters, even the least important ones, have a very marked personality and reality.
As crazy as it all is, thanks to Rivette's magic, everything is absolutely real to us, a kind of parallel reality. The use of time and style that Rivette imposes in the planning of scenes and in the general aesthetics of the film contributes to this. Like magic, it is extremely difficult to recognize the trick, to know how he does it, but the effect is unmistakably magical.
And yes, there is a lot of Feuillade in that mysterious and criminal Paris, in those meetings on rooftops, in those mysterious conversations in the background that we don't hear, in those chases through the boulevards of Paris... and Juliet Berto can very well be considered Rivette's Musidora, although here not exactly lethal and dangerous, but an unfortunate loser continually mocked, but like the unforgettable Irma Vep, equally dressed in striking costumes, disguising herself as a boy, hiding on the roofs and hypnotizing us with her equally magnetic presence.
And continuing with this relationship with Feuillade, there is the attraction and the mystery of images that come to life in our imagination beyond their motivation and strict plot justification. That's pushed to the max in the black and white photo intros.
Many scenes are games and mockery, many are time-outs in which time just passes, conversations that coil on themselves while the actors seem to decide which course they should take, and the film is full of irony and absurd humor. Sometimes they are structural and formal games, artificially symmetrical scenes like the one that begins and ends with Colin approaching or receding with outstretched arms, calling out Pauline's name; or like the conversation in the last part between Sarah and Emilie, which ends up being a kind of Rondo about the same phrases that are repeated over and over again in ritornello.
This story of Thirteen is never very clear, but whatever its function, in the end it seems to us that its main success turns out to become a kind of white rabbit hole in which we enter as Alice, Colin and Frédérique to lose ourselves in a world of fantasy.
An experimental and whimsical fantasy, to which we should not look for emotional, plot or thematic depths, and which, although it makes some tenuous comments that we could consider political and social, is shown to be much more focused on the evocative and expressive value of the image, often independently of the plot.
In short, unique and unrepeatable, without the will to create a school, one of the most special films in the history of cinema. For lovers of fantasy, magic, improvisation, the mystery never solved, Paris in the 70s, experimental theater, the relaxed time that gives rise to a sensation of life, Feuillade, Balzac and Lewis Carroll.
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