New print!

Happiness itself: a new 35mm print of one of Jacques Rivette's most mysterious and mesmerizing films. Bulle Ogier is paired with her daughter Pascale (who died two years later at the age of twenty-five) in this enigmatic thriller with many similarities to Rivette's classic Céline and Julie Go Boating. Bulle plays a claustrophobic just released from prison who joins up with the leather-jacketed Pascale, a glum young woman who likes to knife the eyes out of billboard faces, and might be the older woman's angel-protector or her devious nemesis. Equipped with a map of Paris from a stolen briefcase, the duo chase and are chased through the city's parks and monuments on a scary treasure hunt involving secret surveillance, duplicity, and, of course, plenty of Rivettian paranoia. Filled with references to films by Kurosawa, Bertolucci, Truffaut, Eisenstein and countless others, and plenty of Parisian tourist sights captured in the clarity of winter light, Le Pont du Nord may be a cinephile's dream, but it triumphs on the sheer basis of its two actresses' personalities. "[An] amazing, mysterious masterpiece!" (Daniel Kasman).