Arguably one of the great French filmmakers of all time, and a central figure of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette (seen above looming between Joe and Maria) is one of the most hotly contested geniuses of cinema since the 1960s, with most of his work simply unavailable to American audiences. As with most geniuses, the designation is foisted upon or torn from by the critics; in this case, an elitist corps of cine-intelligentsia that lord over the decision to bestow importance on this filmmaker as opposed to that filmmaker by virtue of “getting it” where others simply don’t.

Spawned by reading Cocteau’s account of the making of La Belle et La Bete (1946), Rivette’s interest in film coalesced with his innate critical faculties and he began to contribute to the legendary Cahiers du Cinema, where his essays on Hitchcock, Renoir, Hawks and Mann are still insightful today.

His apprenticeship under Renoir was followed by work as cameraman on films for peers Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, forming a philosophical alliance that came to be known as the nouvelle vague (New Wave), a theoretical rethinking of the formalist structure of film that resulted in a wave of loosely-structured, elliptical, and very personal films that were read as personal statements by the film’s auteur (its author): the director.

La Religieuse (1967), the tragic story of a woman forced into a nunnery and later sexually pursued by the Mother Superior (based on a play adapted from Diderot’s novel of 1760), became his earliest success. Its temporary banishment in France made it notorious as a cause célèbre.

To satisfy our purposes here, let me say that amidst the tremendous amount of work Rivette has done over his long career there are two superficially notable characteristics that are of importance to us. First, he rarely indulged in working from finished scripts, preferring to allow his films to take shape through improvisations. It was often his practice to allow actors to create roles separate from one another and then he would conceive the outline for their commingling. Second, his films defied the standard running times of commercial cinema. He saw his films as works of art unto themselves, not to be limited by arbitrary constraints, such as when buttocks might start aching or at what point bladder and/or bowels might begin protesting.

L’Amour Fou (1968) runs 252 minutes (4h 12m). His next project, originally slated as a television eight-parter (but not sold), was Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (1971), which chronicled the labyrinthine rehearsals of 40 actors preparing two plays, and it came in at 12 and a half hours. It was shown in its entirety only once. A shortened version, called Out 1: Spectre, is still a healthy 260 minutes.

His masterwork may be Celine Et Julie Vont En Bateau (1974, and a mere 193 minutes), an existential film exploring the relationship of two women, each of whom is integral to the other’s immersion into a fictional reality in a haunted house.

As Joe points out, Merry-Go-Round was heading for the same running time stratosphere. And this on top of the tensions that were running high on the set because no one knew what direction the haphazard project was going.

There were also off-camera personal crises complicating the lives of stars Dallesandro (drugs), Maria Schneider (suicidal ideation), and the director himself (on the verge of a nervous breakdown). It was only when Joe fell off a motorcycle and injured his coccyx that fate happily intervened on the frustrating shoot.

“I didn’t want to, but it was the doctor’s advice that I stop,” Joe recalls. “I’m the kind of actor that if there’s a limb hanging off me, I’m still going to work. The only way any of us could have left the film and got a breather from it, though, was for me to be accidentally injured like that, where the insurance then came in and paid everybody. That’s what happened. Everyone got paid while I was healing. Rivette was going nutty, and Maria was attempting suicide, and so my crack-up gave us a week to calm down and get it together. Rivette was trying to make this movie last forever--we shot a ton of footage--and it was turning out to be one of those 24 hour movies.”

The film originally came about as the answer to a contractual question left open when the director received an advance for an ambitious quartet of films, Scenes de la Vie Parallele, of which he had only made two (Duelle, Noroit). When investors forced his hand, he told them he would make the last two films as one and Merry-Go-Round was the product.

However, it turns out that Merry-Go-Round had nothing to do with either of its predecessors. Instead, it is a strange little detective tale ostensibly concerning a missing woman and a $4,000,000 inheritance. Looking scruffy and wearing a pony-tail, Joe is the New Yorker summoned to Paris to meet a woman likewise summoned from Rome. They soon discover a mutual interest in that the missing woman is both his girlfriend and her eldest sister.

A protracted storyline ensues that twists and turns and reveals half-truths and untruths and deceptions following the reappearance of the girlfriend and a barely satisfying series of revelations about characters’ true identities and ulterior motives. Most of the film sits there like a lump. It’s built on nothing, so it never seems to be progressing.

Rivette underscores the dramatic stasis by inserting abstract sequences in the forest and on the beach where characters are shown running from invisible pursuers, stumbling and tumbling while escaping figments of their own imagination.

Joe’s first inexplicable jog through the countryside goes on for a markedly uneventful few minutes. At least the second time he’s on the run, his girlfriend has sent some black hounds after him and then an armored knight on horseback joins in the fray until Joe succeeds in knocking him off his steed. Joe remembers these marathons well. “We worked on the film for so many weeks, and they kept shooting these scenes where I was running. Running, running, running. It got so bad that I wasn’t even aware Maria had left the picture. She was so far away during these endless scenes that I had no idea they’d replaced her with a double. That’s when I really understood that this movie could go on forever. If they’d have replaced me with a double, they’d still be out there shooting.”

Forced to speak French in his opening scenes, Joe seems so unsure of himself that he can barely pronounce his own name. Thankfully, he’s also allowed to speak English, and in doing so, manages to provide the film with its sole highlight: an utterly charming dinner-by-candlelight improvisation with Maria Schneider.

Setting up in the kitchen of an abandoned house, Joe and Maria prepare an impromptu meal of sardines and marmalade and actually make the whole event quite sexy. Joe beautifully underplays the scene, slyly trying to improvise Maria right into the sack. He playfully boasts of having girlfriends all over the world and then decides “I’ll put my hair down. Do you think you’ll be more attracted?” (Adding to the “truth” of the improvisation and the documentary-like reality of the moment, Joe’s neck audibly cracks at one point during their exchange.)

The entire sequence, which moves to a makeshift bedroom, is very sweet and romantic and honest and the first and last time we actually care about these people. The dialogue is lively and tender and first-rate when these two actors forget about the machinations of Rivette’s great detective romp and just let themselves go. Joe admits a fondness for the bourgeois style of their dinner, but admits that he also enjoys fine champagne when he’s with his girlfriends and they’re buying. He even pulls out a bit of autobiography when he tells Maria about his time spent stealing cars as a youth, amending the tale for the purposes of the story by adding that “my sister lost all respect for me because I wasn’t a very good thief.”

Those curious as to what Joe Dallesandro, the man and not the actor, is really like are provided a small window of opportunity in this refreshing interplay. Fans will wonder when they’ve seen him so animated, but that’s Joe Dallesandro fooling around with Maria Schneider in that desolate kitchen, not Ben Phillipps putting the moves on Leo Hoffmann.

Unfortunately, there’s another hour or more to come of what we’ve experienced before this marvelous little sequence and Joe ends up proving himself an embarrassingly wimpy New Yorker in a feeble fight during the film’s peculiar finale.

With its totally “unrelated” and improvised musical track of bass and clarinet, the film was also to include a weird dream sequence in which the characters found themselves trapped on the titular amusement park ride, relating to the film’s original idea of having the leads psychically re-awakening their childhood. No such scene appears in the final print.

Andy Warhol reported in a diary entry while in Paris in 1977 that he ran into a drunken and filthy Joe (his teeth “like licorice”) cavorting loudly in a restaurant and saying that he was making a movie with Maria Schneider in which they play zombies. (“No, we weren’t zombies,” says Joe with exasperation. “I don’t know where half this crap comes from. The Warhol Diaries are complete bullshit. You can’t believe a thing in them.”)

Merry-Go-Round finally came in at two hours and forty minutes, but Gaumont judged it unsuitable for release. It sat on the shelf for five years and finally opened in France the first week of April, 1983, where it received lukewarm reviews. One critic noted, however, that “a failed Rivette will always be more engaging than a successful Sautet or Woody Allen, because it speaks of the cinema, and the cinema’s morality.”

Joe was unaware of the delay and has always wondered--since he says his contract states that he owns the film for Italian distribution--why he never received prints or any of the related promotional materials.

©Michael Ferguson, 1999