决斗 (1976)

　　1976法国剧情悬疑片《决斗》由雅克·里韦特导演，朱丽叶·贝尔托主演，影片讲述的是：
Rivette is relatively precise in his dealings with meaning He is the most atavistically ceremonious of the Vague in the sense that his abstraction as a journey leading inwards is always attended by signs and codas that affirm our passage The transcendent rite of passage in more ways than one is about the symbolic enactment that paves the way The transcendence itself is left to our sphere of experience but were at least brought to the doorstep
Oh theres the improvisational flow that seems to throw people off that things seem to be randomly bubbling up from nothing without significant plan or substance The chance encounters in a world that we may recognize the geography vaguely familiar whose nature is yet ultimately insoluble Theres a lot of that here As in Celine it is the breathing space that conducts our preparation to step beyond the mechanisms of reason We dont reason with it rather trust its intuitive flow Like the dream world it is only the figment of the known world spontaneously arisen as a stage or blank slate for the atavistic portents and divinations of the subconscious mind to be writ
But the rite of passage matters in spite of the seemingly aimless wandering Here it is about human effort to bypass the wall of paradise constituted by the coincidence of apparent opposites good and evil light and dark being and nonbeing A barrier that obscures vision and traps in a world of names and forms that is only an apparent reality
Rendered in the film as twin goddesses of sun and moon vying for a precious stone that enables their descend into the human world The human characters are mere pawns to their schemes to be seduced tricked threatened or ultimately destroyed Twin femme fatales weaving spells in an inverse noir universe magnified into a macrocosmic struggle
The illprepared man who chances to steal a glimpse of them in their true form like in the myth of Actaion who steals upon the Greek goddess Artemis bathing naked in a pool has his consciousness shattered by the revelation His mirrored image the soul the reflected half is cracked
The woman who finally shatters the illusionary duality that quarantines human consciousness into meaningless dilemmas does so by a sacrifice of blood
And this is the problem of the film So much of it is a stridently symbolic enactment a matter of ceremony The sacrifice is quite literally a matter of spilling blood upon the symbolic stone and does not flow from anything it is simply the schematic end of the spiritual myth Although valuable as insight the meaning of the film is trapped inside the rituals performed to signify it Having cracked the outer shell to absorb it the film seizes to resonate