Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

The Story of Marie & Julien opens in a dream of a dream. It is an appropriate beginning, as most of the film unfolds in a dreamlike or trance like state. Like most French films The Story of Marie & Julien moves slowly, however, for a change the slow pace intensifies both character development and the plot.Initially, both Marie and Julien are individuals who are stuck. Marie explains to Julien that she is "waiting," while Julien appears to be frozen in time and place. Both characters have lost significant others at the film's opening. We are never able to determine whether Julien is frozen because he lost his lover or lost his lover because he is frozen. Marie in contrast, we learn during the course of the film has returned from a far place to repent for a wrong that she committed against her former lover. Unfortunately, her lover is now deceased. This leaves Marie unable to accomplish her task--hence the waiting.From the moment that Julien sees Marie again, he is certain of what he has been waiting for. He bumps into Marie shortly after awaking from his dream. He finds, to his surprise, that she has also been thinking of him. The two of them arrange a meeting before Julien sprints off to an appointment that he is late for. Here the movie takes a strange turn and Julien is revealed to be the most unlikely and least believable criminal in movie history. His victim, Madam X, seems better suited to the task. Indeed, she seems to find Julien more mildly amusing, than threatening.As constructed, Julien's actions seem to be more of a lark than a criminal activity. It is something to do, a diversion from a boring life. He gives the impression that that his true joy comes from disarming Madam X with his crazy demands and his apparent indifference to the outcome of his criminal enterprise. As a character Julien is crotchety and cantankerous, at least mildly depressed, a loner, and outwardly perceived as "mean." In Marie, Julien has met his match. She is indefinable. She fails to keep their planned meeting only to arrive at his home unannounced. She invites him to dinner, spends the night with him, and then disappears early in the morning while he is asleep. She does and says things that she claims to not remember. She, like Julien, is slightly out of phase with the world around her. Julien is desperate to connect with her. Explaining to Marie that he needs her, he soon has her moving into his sprawling house, which is more workshop than home.Julien is a clock smith who works on antique clocks by sound, not sight or touch. According to Julien they are all reparable;it is just a matter of patience. He demonstrates this patience by disassembling and reassembling them time after time until he gets it right. He uses the same method with Marie. Soon, to her surprise, they are passionately in love. Unfortunately, love is not enough. Marie is bound by time constraints and a mandate to rectify a wrong. Lacking her former lover, Marie begins to use Julien as his proxy, hoping to win Julien's forgiveness and release. Working both consciously and unconsciously, directed by her dreams--Marie's behaviors become increasingly bizarre. Madam X, who meets Marie during a blackmail payoff immediately knows what the problem is and shares her knowledge with Julien. Doing further research, Julien is able to piece Marie's story together but decides that it makes little difference to him. The facts, while astounding, make no difference in his love for her.Marie and Julien are left at an impasse. Julien is willing to do anything for Marie, up to freeing her. His love for her will not let him go any further than this. Either she will stay with him or he will follow her. Life without her has become unthinkable. Finally, Marie bows to the futility of her situation. Achieving her mission would put Julien at risk. Rather than risk her lover, she chooses to accept her punishment for failure. The punishment proves to be heart rending for Marie as it forces her to observe Julien's life without her in it. It is a life that is sad, lonely, and hopeless. Julien's only accompaniment is the constant ticking of his clocks marking the passage of time and the ringing of the bell around the neck of his cat Nevermore. He is frozen once again.This is the typical ending for a French film. I was pleasantly surprised when Rivette found a way to surmount an insurmountable problem and take the film in another direction. It is an ending that works. When two people love, it says, nothing is impossible.This is a really good film.

The Story of Marie and Julien is an attempt at a modern-day Gothic, emphasis on "attempt." This might come as a shock to someone who has only seen the first half-hour of the film; nothing could be less "Gothic" than the fluent, slightly odd-ball thriller/romance the film at first seems to be developing into. But Jacques Rivette introduces the supernatural elements gently, easing the film in a direction that carries it surprisingly far away from where it begins. Despite Rivette's deft touch, the movie's modern-Gothic turn is a disappointing one, a twist that has you scratching your head in entirely the wrong way.There's something off about the movie from the start, especially its title characters, who both seem to have more than a few screws loose. Jerzy Radziwiliowicz plays Julien, a reclusive clock-repairman who dabbles in blackmail. Seemingly out of the blue Julien re-kindles his relationship with an old flame, Marie (Emmanuelle Beart), who moves into his big, dark, cluttered house and begins mysteriously re-arranging the upstairs furniture. Rivette observes these characters meticulously, homing in on their quirks, viewing their behavior with a sense of discretion that never veers into impassivity; the film becomes fascinating because the characters are so eccentric, because Rivette seems tickled by their eccentricity while still maintaining the dark, enigmatic undertones. The thing is, we don't want to understand these characters - we want them to keep their inscrutability, their weird sense of shared disconnection from the rest of the world (Julien's house becomes a kind of universe unto itself, one he and Marie are both slowly disappearing into). The story has great folie a deux potential, especially with such a skilled observer, such a keen psychologist as Rivette at the helm. Unfortunately this is not exactly what Rivette has in mind. Working from a script by Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent and himself, Rivette has created a Gothic story with modern trappings - Marie is a ghost who has committed suicide, a ghost who appears in the flesh only to Julien, the man she supposedly loves (when she and Julien have sex it re-defines necrophilia). The supernatural turn is supposed to make the story more mysterious, more profound, but it has the complete opposite effect. We find ourselves riveted by Marie and Julien's every unaccountable action, the strange desperation of their sex, the way their fractured personalities begin to twine around each other, filling in each other's gaps, but when it turns out that Marie is a ghost, a lost spirit seeking some crazy redemption, it actually shatters the mystery rather than heightening it. The story would be better, more satisfying, if Marie's nature remained hidden from us, if her relationship with Julien were allowed to play out logically, to continue its inevitable spiral. Emmanuelle Beart is such an ethereal actress anyway that having her literally play a ghost seems almost redundant - she's a ghost even when she's playing flesh-and-blood (it's the kind of perfect casting that's a bit too perfect). The mystery comes from Beart's vaguely creepy presence, from the big house full of dismantled clocks, from Radziwilowicz's depressiveness and casual criminality, from Rivette's ability to make everyday actions like counting money and washing one's face hum with elusive meaning - not from the Gothic plot-twist, which annihilates the initial, off-beat sense of mystery and replaces it with something relatively predictable and ultimately self-defeating.

Why do certain people that go to the movies think that (their) being bored is important for the destiny of the world? Why do they keep punching us with their problems of boredom?Can't they understand that, to share something with the others, it's important to have some ideas (just a small one, please...) about the movie itself? Do they think that when they proclaim their boredom they are giving to the world some kind of undisputed law?Is it so difficult to understand that the Rivette work cannot be understood by the rules of mediocre entertainment? Is it so painful to address the simple idea that Rivette keeps filming the mystery of love? And that he doesn't want to bore us with the vulgar ideas of a vulgar TV-movie?

A great disappointment. Jacques Rivette has made some very interesting films in his long career, my favourite being Jeanne la Pucelle. Unfortunately, this effort has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The characters are not believable and hold no interest. The dialogue is incoherent and does not hold interest. This film is two and a half hour long and becomes quickly unbearable. I left at the halfway mark (I rarely leave before the end of a movie). Perhaps it might have improved later on but it seemed highly unlikely at the time.