Noroît

Well, this is very different from all other Rivette movies I’ve seen. It’s a costume drama? And the dialogue seems very un-improvised.

OK, I take back what I said about this seeming non-improvised.

Oh, that’s where the scary music was coming from!

The choice to have a band apparently improvising music while the shoot is going on is a bold one. Must make editing scenes after the fact virtually impossible.

It’s nice music, though. Very AMM.

The Pirates of Brittany.

This is good, but… there’s so many characters (and many of them look quite similar) that I’m having some problems understanding quite what’s going on. I mean, the plot probably isn’t the point of the movie anyway, but it’s still slightly frustrating.

That is, it’s partially riveting and partially frustrating.

The audio on this movie is really important — the use of music and natural sounds is so interesting. It’s a rather hypnotic movie… but only in the second half. The first half is rather a jumble of stuff and is hard to get into. But the last half! Geez. Fantastic.

I guess a reasonable rating would be ⚃, but I’ll go with:

Noroît. Jacques Rivette. 1976. ⚄