Noroît (1976) Online

How wondrously weird a concoction this is! A swashbuckling, all-woman pirate melodrama in 70s Jacobean drag. (OK, we see a few men round the edges, but their role is purely decorative - like Olivia de Havilland in an old Errol Flynn movie.) It's been adapted very freely from Cyril Tourneur's play The Revenger's Tragedy, so the soundtrack shifts from French into English for the more lyrical bits of verse. Music is provided by an on-screen chamber orchestra, fiddling away in a corner of a dank Breton castle.

"No," you decide every five minutes or so. "It cannot possibly get any more bizarre than this!" Lo and behold, it promptly does. Bernadette Laffont makes a splendidly wicked Pirate Queen, in the cross-dressing tradition of Joan Crawford in Johhny Guitar or Barbara Stanwyck in Forty Guns. The normally fragile and tremulous Geraldine Chaplin makes a suprisingly ruthless, full-blooded avenger. She must have the most wonderfully long, sinuous hands of any screen performer since Max Schreck in Nosferatu.

An unmissable treat for anyone who has a weak spot for truly deranged cinema, Noroit is widely unavailable these days. Like its companion piece Duelle, it's part of a four-part series that director Jacques Rivette was never able to complete. A great shame! I find both these films utterly compulsive and hypnotic, while much of Rivette's later work is tediously dry and academic. Even in the most dismal of worn-out video copies, taped off some obscure German cable channel at 4 AM, Noroit and Duelle are worth seeking out.

A pirate island and hidden treasure, a death of a brother and the thirst for vengeance - that is what lies on the surface. Northwest Wind is based vaguely on the plays of Thomas Middleton and Cyril Tourneur that are both named The Revenger's Tragedy and have somewhat similar plots. There are also some allusions to Hamlet by William Shakespeare in the scene of play inside play including original text by Cyril Tourneur. The action more resembles a ballet than pirate adventures and the scenes of vengeful murders are symbolically histrionic and artfully conditional. It is quite interesting to compare this theatrical fantasy with Revenger's Tragedy by Alex Cox which is screened in the style of postmodern punk.

Whilst a few of the shots in this film may merit some fancy, the experience of watching this film from beginning to end is draining and unrewarding. As an experimental film that does not seek to tell a story nor make any impressive aesthetic propositions in the way of, say, David Lynch, it does well to stay in archives. Jacques Rivette is by all means a notable director whose films should be seen, but far from being an exemplary work of his, Noroît is a doodle made in the margin of his white list. At best it gives an insight into the director's character, and really should be out of bounds to anybody other than Rivette heavyweights.

A lack of a coherent narrative can be compensated for through other means such as through a Beckettian abstract aesthetic or through a Bergmanesque dreamscape. There are numerous films that sack story to discover the other facets of cinema but this one does not sincerely arrive at any kind of relevant revelation. With the liberty to fiddle with cameras and a cast Rivette works out what cinema can't achieve more than what it can. It's viewing interest is comparable to reading the private notes of an established artist or author to better understand how he comes to put together his more meritorious works.

That said, there are certain moments which suggest that Rivette is indeed trying to communicate with an audience and not just getting on with his personal pursuit. Bearing in mind that this film is adapted from a 5 act play, Rivette on occasion inserts the notion that the characters are conscious of the fact that they are actors. To begin with, realism or dramatic calibre of any other description is deliberately (I presume) humiliated by actors who, for example, shamelessly continue to breathe whilst lying dead on the ground. Also the script somewhat bizarrely alternates between French and high register English at times when they choose to honour the heavier lines of the original script. An infuriating cacophony emerging from the on-screen band of musical pirates provides the soundtrack for the pseudo-drama, which further reinforces the idea that this film consciously reflects its genre. Perhaps then, Noroît is a film about itself, and behind the chaos is a group of characters desperately trying to find themselves a narrative to fulfil their existence.

Still, this is a film that is very tiresome to sit through and even if the ideas outlined above were indeed Rivette's intentions there are works that portray them much more neatly. Noroît comes across as a tangled mishmash of propositions and is as pleasing as a beginner's violin scale practice.

On an island beach a woman vows to avenge her brother's death at the hands of a pirate leader. With help, the woman spies on the pirates and then gets a job as bodyguard to the pirate leader.

Allegedly, in the original plan, "Noroît" would have followed "Duelle" (1976) as the third episode of the intended four-film series Scènes de la vie parallèle (the first being a supernatural love story and the fourth a musical). This film does have some similar themes to "Duelle", most notably that it is classified as an "experimental fantasy".

Those looking for a straight-up revenge story with pirates may want to look elsewhere. This is a fine film, but the pirates seem more like an acting troupe without a theater than a serious gang of scalawags to be afraid of.