“… generally considered a failure – but what a failure it is!” A quote from the Mubi “our take” description accompanying Jacques Rivette’s Merry-Go-Round (1981), and if you do any cursory reading around the film’s making you can understand why even the director himself considered it a “failure”. The third of four planned movies he was making in quick succession, Rivette suffered a mental breakdown during filming, and only completed it on the encouragement of his actors; one of the two leads, Maria Schneider (from Last Tango In Paris, The Passenger) also was undergoing health issues and could not complete filming. Why watch a failure then? There were two Rivette movies on Mubi that I hadn’t seen, and I tried watching the pirate revenge movie Noirot but couldn’t get into it (I will try again). I am keen to see more Rivette movie and understand his whole thing more: the sense of games, theatricality, surreality, improvisation and play. And wanting the more contemporary option – contemporary to its time (though it was actually completed in the late 1970s and only released in 1981).
Merry-Go-Round has the skeleton of a thriller buried within and it flirts with genre trappings – fights, shootings, double-crosses – but for the majority of its two-hour plus running time, it’s not too bothered about getting there, which I’m sure will test some viewer’s patience. Two strangers to each other – Leo (Schneider) and Ben (Joe Dallensandro) – meet in a French hotel. They have both received telegrams to meet Elizabeth (Daniele Gegauff) there; Leo is Elizabeth’s sister, and Ben is Elizabeth’s boyfriend. As Leo and Ben pursue Elizabeth’s whereabouts through directions and clues, they become embroiled in a plot involving the disappearance of Leo and Elizabeth’s father, presumed dead, and a lost of sum of money (four million francs). However, what you mainly observe is Leo and Ben travelling between country townhouses, most of them abandoned, searching and talking between rooms. This is a rough movie with the dialogue occasionally mumbled and inaudibly recorded. Intercut to the narrative are two parallel tracks. One track is a dream space where the characters are being chased: Ben through the woods, Elizabeth on a beach (though replaced with another actress, Hermine Karagheuz). The other track intercut with the main narrative is footage of two musicians Barre Phillips and John Surman performing the downbeat jazz score in a room. The sense of exhaustion to the film emanates from the repetitive dream sequences, the sense of constantly rushing, or falling in the sand.
Yet the film is still intriguing and compelling, particularly with the combined presence of Schneider and Dallensandro, both wearing double denim, like a pair of 1970s burn-outs on a scavenger hunt, Schneider’s withdrawn quality contrasting against the Dallensandro’s New York street tough aura. I knew of Dallensandro a bit – “Little Joe” from the Warhol scene – but this was the first film (aside from The Limey) I was watching him in from this period, pony-tail swagger amongst all the French cast. A noirish film running on fumes and improvisation, but that still finds moments of grace and artistry, particularly by the time of its one-two punch denouement. Recommended, to a degree.
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