L’AMOUR FOU W/ A.S. HAMRAH

Confined to decades of oblivion after its original celluloid elements were damaged in a fire, Jacques Rivette’s formally brilliant and psychologically lacerating L’AMOUR FOU — among the most important and legendary films of the French New Wave — has been meticulously restored and will be presented by critic A.S. Hamrah in celebration of his recent collection ALGORITHM OF THE NIGHT!

Arguably the most extreme, radical, and essential of the French auteur’s films, L’AMOUR FOU was Rivette’s first feature to introduce the signature characteristics of his visionary cinema, including a durational gamesmanship and reflexive interplays between film, theatre, art, and life.

Narcissistic theatre director Sebastian (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) is staging and rehearsing a minimalist adaptation of Racine’s Andromaque while an independent television crew (led by André Labarthe) shoots a documentary of the preparations in real time, their handheld 16mm footage cut alongside the rest of the film shot on 35mm. Under extreme pressure, Sebastian’s actor wife Claire (Bulle Ogier, never more luminous) buckles and anxiously abandons her role, only to be replaced by his ex, further spurring her jealousy, isolation, and paranoia. 

A portrait of mad love and of unbridled and boundless passion that threatens to eclipse (even annihilate) the self, over four hypnotic, spellbinding hours, L’AMOUR FOU weds astonishing improvisation with raw psychodrama, defying the limits of reality as life and art risk dangerously, desirously subsuming one another.