With "Secret Defense", a celebrated "art" director (Jacques Rivette) tackles a popular "pulp" genre (the mystery thriller). The result is demanding yet unpretentious; what Rivette asks from his audience is simply to surrender to his own specific style and rhythm, which means: no musical score (except for the credits),long camera takes, detailed observation of (not always) insignificant everyday activities, no comic relief, etc. If you are prepared to do that, the film is very accessible; it has a solid, coherent plot and gives you, gradually, every piece of the puzzle. It's basically a meditation on the twists of fate, leading to a shocking yet plausible ending. And as you'd expect from a French film, the acting is exceptional; Sandrine Bonnaire doesn't simply play the central tormented character, she becomes one with it. On the whole, I think "Secret Defense" is a refreshing break from both "too-commercial" and "too-arty" fare, and an engrossing experience. *** out of 4.

This is a spectacularly successful mystery film by director Jacques Rivette, who also collaborated on the screenplay. His films always contain long, lingering shots and scenes that seem to go on forever. Sometimes this can be so irritating one wants to scream. For instance, I tried three times to watch his LA BELLE NOISEUSE (1991) and gave up in exasperation each time because it was so boring, so enormously long, and like a vanity exercise. One would therefore think that the last person to make a successful thriller would be Rivette, with his slow pace. But incredibly, with this film, his snail's pace works perfectly and turns the film into a masterpiece. This would have been impossible without the genius actress Sandrine Bonnaire, who plays the lead and monopolizes the screen with complete success. Bonnaire made it clear to the world that she was at a higher level than most actresses in 1985 when she starred in Agnes Varda's extraordinary and searing film, VAGABOND (SANS TOI NI LOI). She is so quiet and meditative that she sucks the audience into the vortex of her thoughts, and carries us right along with her as she swirls with silent, unarticulated torment. She showed this again in the amazing L'EMPREINTE DE L'ANGE (MARK OF AN ANGEL aka ANGEL OF MINE, 2008, see my review). She really is one of the most intense and powerful actresses in the world today. In this film, she plays a cold, introverted, determined woman who has withdrawn into herself and is unable to return affection without the greatest of difficulty. The man who is constantly courting her and assuring her of his feelings is barely noticed by her, so absorbed is she in her own issues, and preoccupied by what is troubling her. 'Secret défense' is the French expression corresponding to 'official secret' in English. It is not necessarily a reference to military defence (British) or military defense (USA). Although Bonnaire's deceased father had been the head of France's largest defence contractor, succeeded by the mysterious figure of Walser, played with appropriate ambiguity by Polish actor Jerzy Radziwilowicz (which by the way means 'son of Radziwil' in Polish),who is so well known to cinema lovers from Andrezj Wajda's classic films MAN OF MARBLE (1977) and MAN OF IRON (1981),these hints of military secrecy flicker in the background like the reflections on a wall in an indoor swimming pool, but never come into focus. This all helps to create the air of menace and conspiracy which pervades this film, and which expresses the French attitude towards the worlds of officialdom, money and power. This film is primarily one of slow realization of what had previously seemed inconceivable to the normal and innocent mind. Bonnaire is brilliant at slowly coming to these realizations before our eyes, in the lingering shots where there is nothing between her face and us but her thoughts. How easily this film could have failed miserably! But she and Rivette together pull it off, almost as a miracle. I was on the edge of my seat for each and every prolonged scene, and never lost patience. The slow pace merely serves to heighten and intensify the unbearable suspense. Somehow Rivette knew the exact instant to cut. As soon as a scene has served its purpose, and been squeezed of the last of its juice, it skin is thrown into the bucket and we reach for the next fruit. I watched this film twice because I wanted to be sure. Yes, it really is a masterpiece of filmmaking. The music at the beginning and the end is viola da gamba music played by Jordi Savall (one of the world's two best gamba players, the other being the younger Paolo Pandolfo). The film's inherent ambiguity and theme of double-appearances is intensified by the acting of the amazing Laure Marsac, who plays identical twin sisters. Both of them are in a perpetual state of volatile and wavering uncertainty. After Bonnaire is informed by her younger brother that he has found evidence that their father had been murdered five years before, and that he was pushed from a train by someone, and did not jump and commit suicide as officially recorded, she receives a curious visit from Marsac, who is Walser's secretary and lover. This is one of the most ambiguous scenes in the film, in which nothing which is intended to be said is actually said by Marsac, and she reluctantly leaves without having made her purpose clear at all. The air of mystery is continually heightened by such devices of the story. Guns are continually being taken out of pockets and put into drawers or desks, and we don't know where they keep coming from. We are constantly aware that they are there, and could be removed and used by one of the many increasingly desperate people in this story. Then one of the twin sisters disappears and suddenly she is seen again by the shocked characters in the story, only to be revealed as the unknown twin whom they had not realized existed. She moves into the country mansion known as 'the Domaine' and assumes the role of her vanished sister. Meanwhile, Bonnaire's desperate younger brother is charging around on his motorbike with his gun, threatening to kill Walser, who he says killed his father in order to take over his company. A photo has mysteriously appeared, we are never told from where, showing Walser with his father on the train platform on the morning of the father's death, contradicting Walser's supposed alibi that he was elsewhere at the time. This film has two parallel stories, like two parallel universes, the false and the true. At how many points do these intersect? And how can truth be separated from illusion in this double world where it is not only sisters who are twins, but events themselves which exist in two forms and which bear an ambiguous and double interpretation?

A warning first off that if you have problems with slow tempo in movies you really aren't going to make it to the end of this one, because the tempo here is slooooow.

The plot concerns a cellular biologist by profession called Sylvie (Sandrine Bonnaire) and her attempt resolve a mystery concerning the death of her father a decade previously, prime suspect is his business associate Walser (Jerzy Radziwilowicz). The story is a tragedy by structure.

Secret défense has been labelled a thriller by some, but verging on three hours and with only enough action to fill a single conventional thriller hour at the most, and that quite tame, your adrenal gland is going to be taking a kip during this movie. Furthermore the elements of the thriller genre are mostly joshed. For example, there's a date-stamped intertitle at the start of the movie that announces that it's Friday May 9th at 10 o'clock, it's the only title of it's kind in the movie and apropos of nothing, cocking a snook at the pointlessness of this genre convention. Action scenes are drained of dramatic impact and woodenly acted, as if they are reenactments or rehearsals. The scenes are pathetic, in that they are designed to make you feel the wretched stupidity and irreversibility of violence. Effects are no more complicated than the old blood capsule in the mouth. The plot seems carelessly anachronistic, hinging around a train murder that makes no sense: unfortunately throwing someone off a TGV and making it seem like an accident, due to modern safety precautions, is slightly less plausible than it would have been in Hitchcock's day. One minor annoyance is that telephone conversations are carried out by obvious voice-over from the voice at the end of the line, which carries no telephonic distortion. Still this is probably conspicuous lack of care.

There are two great things going on with the movie though. The first is the simple joy in listening to people speak deeply that characterises the best New Wave films. Just simple things like the admission of the housekeeper Marthe that she never really had a childhood because she was always big inside her head. The second thing is the subtle photography of great New Wave cinematographer William Lubtchansky, who unfortunately passed away earlier this year. The exact allure of his work is hard to point a finger at, there is nothing mannered about his style. He manages threat very well here, just through little things, like having a coach driving up the road behind Sylvie whilst she is walking at night and pulling up in front of her, perfectly normal yet alarming on an animal level, or having trains crash past at the station. Warnings occur as well, a yellow hazard sign in the corner of the screen at the lab, a red warning light on the metro line, used rather than placed, all very natural. The value is often more to do with absence than anything else, I never saw anything in the movie that was visually inappropriate, that didn't feel right, Lubtchansky seems to have a feeling for what fits, for what works, an organic economy and a lack of extravagance that filled me with slow-burn joy. My favourite shot perhaps was in the mansion, where Sylvie walks through a gloomy room towards the garden and becomes silhouetted from behind, a sign perhaps of the darkness enveloping her. I also liked the psychological significance of the landscape backgrounds during train scenes, Sylvie full of clarity and deadly intent travels to the visual accompaniment of flat verdant blur; later with her mother the speed is slower, the landscape cluttered with a sprawling carpet of white buildings, disorganised, encumbering, again images used not forced.

It's a movie perhaps about folly perhaps. Sylvie ignores the patient wooing of an urbane work colleague to concentrate on raking up the past. Both Sylvie and Walser are slaves of their work. A note to all plate-spinners: the plates will carry on spinning without you! The one constant of any large organisation is the superfluity of absolutely any individual. Incidentally Sylvie's work world was rendered quite well, back at university I used to do lab work in a cellular biology lab, Sylvie was there using a Gilson's pipette correctly and expelling the tips, which was quite nostalgic for me. According to the credits the scenes were actually shot in the labs of the Institut Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris.

The soundtrack consists of only two songs which play over the start and end of the credits, one piece is by Spanish Renaissance composer Pedro Guerrero and is a "moresca" called "Di, perra mora", "Variation: Moorish whore" the other an anonymous piece also from the same era "Diferencias sobre las Vacas", or "Cow variations". Morescas were grotesque foolish dances where the dancers often posed as blacked-up Moors. I think the implication is that we're seeing some sort of timeless farce, with the characters condemned to repeat foolish steps, despite the presence of reason.