Synopsis
A playwright offers two actress friends the chance to appear in his new, unfinished play, which consists of only one female part.
Love on the Ground
1984 ‘L'Amour par terre’ Directed by Jacques Rivette
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Alternative Titles
El amor por tierra, Földi szerelem, L'amore in pezzi, 지상의 사랑, Любовь на траве, 真幻之爱
Releases by Date
Premiere
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USA
New York Film Festival
Theatrical limited
19 Sep 1986
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USA
Theatrical
17 Oct 1984
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France
Releases by Country
France
17 Oct 1984
- Theatrical
USA
06 Oct 1984
- Premiere New York Film Festival
19 Sep 1986
- Theatrical limited
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The play’s the thing; but is it the real thing, the mirror image of the thing, or the only thing in Jacques Rivette’s “Love on the Ground.”
For the first time since his debut feature, Rivette returns to Shakespeare. Using his favored motif of a group of actors rehearsing for a classical play, the work at the foundation of “Ground” is none other than the renowned “Hamlet.”
Here, though, the Danish-set tragedy is more allusion than production. Just as “Ground” is a play within a film (maybe with several layers beyond that), so it references “Hamlet’s” play within a play, “The Mouse Trap.” Just as the melancholic prince used the narrative of the work to catch the conniving King Claudius,…
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Many Rivette films are an intense experience of me fighting against my inherent hatred of theatre kids.
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Rivette channels voyeuristic gamesmanship in the opening scene and soon leads into an outrageous (perhaps haunted?) mansion. It's one of the most playfully fascinating openings I've seen in a minute. Once successfully "auditioned", our principal players move into this mansion. What starts as a love triangle turns into a quadrilateral as Emily (Jane Birkin) and Charlotte's (Geraldine Chaplin) lives mirror fantasy.
Rivette is more grounded here but is still endlessly entertained by concepts (art v life, reality v fantasy, magic, magicians, mystery, oh my) and he's having a blast being his usual trickster. Chaplin and Birkin are full of contagious joy and life. I mean, it's Jane Birkin and Geraldine Chaplin, come on!
Jacques Rivette #2
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Rivette's interest in magic, theatre, mystery, and convolution come together neatly here, as a magician shares a mansion with two young actresses and a playwright as they rehearse and eventually perform a play based on a a mysterious relationship drama that recently played out between the magician, the playwright, and an erstwhile woman named Beatrice. It is a film of foreshadowing and mirror images, carefully executed in anticipation of the main event, which isn't so much the performance of the play as it is the aftermath..
I can't say I always invested in the relationship drama, but the hints of supernatural visions and the central mystery were intriguing, leaving the film feeling like it was being dragged down a bit.…
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A play within a play within a play or a play as real life? The distinction between the two blur. It opens with a play taking place in a house. Bystanders stand in a dark room and act as a laugh track and applause at times. But the acting is obviously a play. You can tell it's not real life. You can tell it's not a movie. It's a distinct acting style. The playwright comes to talk to an actress to give her praise for changing the lines. It felt natural, he said. That's almost like real life too. When someone's character is threatened, such as a sexual harassment claim, their character is now changed forever with…
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My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic.
- Gabriel García MárquezBlurred lines, mirrored images. Wind-up toys set loose. Mundane fences block your path, all you need to do is step through - imbue life
As you like it
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Like most Rivette, and even more so Rivette from this period, the filmmaking is based in the opposition between the freedom of gesture of the performances and the careful created limited world around them. The fiction created as a reaction against an overdesign oppressive place. By making it a movie about performance and fiction, Rivette risks things become a little plain, but is constant recued by Chaplin and Birkin. Longer cut, which certainly hives the performers more space,
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After seeing a string of movies with Rivette in literalist mode -- Joan Of Arc, Noiseuse and such, that seem like anyone sufficiently 'arthouse' could have done them -- it's very! good to see him returning to his anti-realist inspirations. Among many other things, this seems like an alternate take on Celine Et Julie where the gals are fully absorbed into the workings of That House and have to learn to navigate Those Dramas and interact with Those People. Which isn't easy for either of them and makes for a rather grim narrative with not much happiness available to anybody.
It's also an examination of the destructive concept of the female muse, a whole strong of allusions to other movies, and I know not what else. Demands revisiting. Maybe frequent revisiting. Even if it's a tad unpleasant. And maybe a tad too long.
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More than 25 years before “Sleep No More” made a splash in New York City, Jacques Rivette made “Love on the Ground,” a film about an acting troupe that performs immersive, site-specific theater. Actresses Emily (Jane Birkin) and Charlotte (Geraldine Chaplin) are hired by playwright Clément Roquemaure (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) to perform a play at his mansion. As the actresses rehearse and reside at the playwright's home, they learn that the play is based on an incident from Roquemaure’s past involving a romantic rivalry between the dramatist and a magician (André Dussollier), and they begin to have visions of the tragedy. Charlotte comes to believe she’s the character she’s playing, and she and Emily — like Céline and Julie before them…