Midnight. Everyone's asleep. Bravo is showing it far too well-padded with commercials. The spring forward version of daylight savings time is in full effect. And there's me on the couch saying, without hesitation, "Please come in, I've been expecting you".

What's interesting about Rivette's films (he says having seen exactly two) are the substance of his theory, not necessarily the substance of the film (as the substance is largely a depiction of the theory). Here, he investigates the interchangability of the way we live in stories and the ways that stories live in us. The nature of cinema - your interpretation drifting past concrete image - is that of malleable imagination; Rivette's commentary on the way in which we experience film, its singular communicatory power to the individual and the staleness of passive absorption fires likely the most relevant round in all of the French New Wave. Simply - but not so much, really - he observes the travails of Celine and Julie, a night club magician and a librarian with a taste for tarot and spells, respectively, as they visit and revisit a "haunted house" (to quote the hilariously misdirecting New Yorker Films blurb on the back of the box). Here, they are entranced with a Victorian melodrama about a grieving widower whose daughter is the target of two scheming seductresses eager to claim her father for their own. Equating cinema with candy, with strong drink, with dazed wonderment, with magic, and with active participation, Rivette's doubles' riff (everything that happens occurs in twos, bent through Celine or Julie's eyes or, as it happens to them) teems with a sort of in-the-moment glee that not only embraces cinema as a living, breathing thing, but clearly and shamelessly defines it. No hyperboles here. When Julie explains that her future is her present, all the dullness of Rivette's long, grueling setup melts away and suddenly, it's all so clear: The now is only seen within the perspective of (s)he who envisions it - whenever they envision it - and is only that thing seem that way (that time) for that moment. Cinema as fragile as the stem of a champagne glass and as permanent as existence itself.

7/1: I'm not sure if this was at the apex of my Tom Cruise hatred or if the film itself warranted such a black mark. At any rate, why there was a time in my life (the 11-13 range) when I thought this the tops - its soundtrack just bursting with greatness - I'll never know. Perhaps I overrated Bryan Brown. Or it was the side of Elizabeth's Shue's boob in the waterfall scene. Or the deep, dark suicide at close. Whatever the case, more ammunition for the theory that most movies of this sort, despite being marketed towards adults, are really much closer to the level of kids and young teenagers. 

Reconstructed mainly to exhibit a previous untapped flashback structure discussed by Welles in interviews from five versions of the film ("The Corinth Version" is the skeleton, "The Confidential Report Version" is the skin while pieces from both "Spanish Version[s]" give the thing an inclusive dimension - - hence, "The Comprehensive Version"); More interesting is the way it returns to Bracco's less "conventional" motive for tipping off Guy and Mily (using Welles' voice dubbed over instead of actor Aslan, he whispers the two names out of deluded, dying friendship rather than out of revenge). All of it seems for naught, however, as Mr. Arkadin in both this version and "The Confidential Report Version" are marred by redundant, expository padding, an extremely hollow antagonist - he's scary, but in the same way every ssingle time, which becomes significantly less scary as the film wanes on - and a horrifically lousy actor in the lead role (Robert Arden,  ironically given refuge in two pseudonyms (Bob Hayden and Mark Sharpe) in the Spanish versions, plays smarmy with little range or subtlety). For all its problems, Arkadin is beautifully shot, composed in typically Wellesian low angles with chaotic, dreamlike crowd scenes and one brilliantly off-kilter sequence where it appears that Arkadin defies even the rocking of an ocean liner. It truly mirrors the kind of European financial exile Welles found himself in, looking nearly as bits-n-pieces as Othello, but never reaching a point where it makes this fragmentation work for it. Clarity (in this version) - it turns out - is probably the last thing a film like this needs. Though he praises it right and left in the accompanying documentary, Peter Bogdanovich touches on a very telling point: It's nice that the opportunity exists to have five versions of the film and be able to piece together one that's closest to what we believe Welles' original intention might have been, but...but...if only we had the last hour of Ambersons. If only we had this many resources on a truly great film rather than a good, reasonably mediocre one. In other words: Perhaps a big deal is being made simply because it can be.

"Dude, it's not widescreen."
"Dude, it doesn't matter."

It's no fluke. It's the best Woody Allen film in 7 years.