Noroît (1976) User Reviews

French Pirates

[gavin6942 · 7/10 · 17 May 2017]

On an island beach a woman vows to avenge her brother's death at the hands of a pirate leader. With help, the woman spies on the pirates and then gets a job as bodyguard to the pirate leader.

Allegedly, in the original plan, "Noroît" would have followed "Duelle" (1976) as the third episode of the intended four-film series Scènes de la vie parallèle (the first being a supernatural love story and the fourth a musical). This film does have some similar themes to "Duelle", most notably that it is classified as an "experimental fantasy".

Those looking for a straight-up revenge story with pirates may want to look elsewhere. This is a fine film, but the pirates seem more like an acting troupe without a theater than a serious gang of scalawags to be afraid of.

Interesting formal experiment of meticulous execution, beautiful images and crazy development

[Falkner1976 · 7/10 · 7 June 2023]

Very free adaptation of the famous Jacobin tragedy today attributed to Thomas Middleton. Like so many Jacobin tragedies, it is a fascinating and crazy hodgepodge of betrayals, murders, torture, which in this case is characterized by a tone close to farce and full of humorous nods to the audience about the amusing conventions of the genre, all in a language unforgettable in its wit and expressiveness.

What remains in the film is little more than the distribution in scenes. In the play Vindice, whose fiancée was poisoned by the vicious Duke becomes Geraldine Chaplin whose brother was murdered by the fearsome pirate Bernadette Lafont. In the play he has to put an end to a whole family of degenerate rulers, here she has to kill the whole band of pirates. Above all, a particularly twisted crime remains and some verses taken out of context.

Initially we think that Chaplin is a young woman who has read the Jacobin tragedy and has been inspired by it to carry out her particular revenge. To give herself strength she recites some verses of it from time to time and uses Vindice's way of getting rid of the duke to get rid of one of her enemies.

The most direct reference is the fun organized by Chaplin and Markham in the court of the pirate Lafont, a very particular representation of the most striking scene of the original tragedy.

But in the last forty minutes, it seems that Rivette is afraid of the short scope of the film, certainly a fascinating formal diversion gloriously inconsequential in its contents, and wants to take a plot twist, in line with a dark mythological fight that he plans to develop through other of his films. The substitution of the avenger Chaplin for that lunar deity, and of the pirate Lafont for the solar deity, is not intended to be justified in any way, while it invalidates the previous scenes from the plot.

We can understand that Chaplin disguised his mythological fight in a Jacobin revenge to deceive everyone, but not that for almost two hours she believed herself to be in that role. We no longer know if in those last scenes there has been a possession of poor Chaplin's body used by the lunar deity for her own purposes. Anyway it's not like it's worth racking your brains over that nonsense, either. The truth is that the film leads to an incomprehensible last half hour reminiscent of a psychedelic party.

But what makes the film interesting is its extraordinarily sophisticated visual style, mannerist staging, and light-hearted narration.

Nothing is or pretends to be credible, it seems that everything is a purely formal element, a pirate fantasy in a world different from the real one, which is not governed by logic but by the artistic effect, the visual composition, the internal movement in each shot , the planning of the scenes.

There is a clear camp and over-the-top effect, in the eccentricity of the costumes, the exaggeration of the poses and the behavior of the actors, close to cross-dressing, especially of Lafont as the pirate Giulia who behaves like a drag queen.

Chaplin is more mannerist and artificial than ever, obviously guided by Rivette, Markham as always discreet and understated, Lafont in the purest drag style, men mostly have a residual presence.

Until the last half hour, everything has a fascinating and ridiculous effect at the same time, although incomprehensible in terms of its purpose, with exceptionally beautiful images, the natural settings, the castle decorations, the careful props and even the colorful and unclassifiable costumes.

It suffers from an excessively gratuitous tone, from disguising the motivation of so much carnival too much. But it is highly recommended for lovers of the rarities of French cinema of the seventies, of formal experiments, of the most sophisticated dramatization.

A Post-Modern Pirates of the Caribbean!

[dwingrove · 26 February 2004]

How wondrously weird a concoction this is! A swashbuckling, all-woman pirate melodrama in 70s Jacobean drag. (OK, we see a few men round the edges, but their role is purely decorative - like Olivia de Havilland in an old Errol Flynn movie.) It's been adapted very freely from Cyril Tourneur's play The Revenger's Tragedy, so the soundtrack shifts from French into English for the more lyrical bits of verse. Music is provided by an on-screen chamber orchestra, fiddling away in a corner of a dank Breton castle.

"No," you decide every five minutes or so. "It cannot possibly get any more bizarre than this!" Lo and behold, it promptly does. Bernadette Laffont makes a splendidly wicked Pirate Queen, in the cross-dressing tradition of Joan Crawford in Johhny Guitar or Barbara Stanwyck in Forty Guns. The normally fragile and tremulous Geraldine Chaplin makes a suprisingly ruthless, full-blooded avenger. She must have the most wonderfully long, sinuous hands of any screen performer since Max Schreck in Nosferatu.

An unmissable treat for anyone who has a weak spot for truly deranged cinema, Noroit is widely unavailable these days. Like its companion piece Duelle, it's part of a four-part series that director Jacques Rivette was never able to complete. A great shame! I find both these films utterly compulsive and hypnotic, while much of Rivette's later work is tediously dry and academic. Even in the most dismal of worn-out video copies, taped off some obscure German cable channel at 4 AM, Noroit and Duelle are worth seeking out.

A Prolonged Waltz of Death

[JustApt · 9/10 · 15 June 2013]

A pirate island and hidden treasure, a death of a brother and the thirst for vengeance - that is what lies on the surface. Northwest Wind is based vaguely on the plays of Thomas Middleton and Cyril Tourneur that are both named The Revenger's Tragedy and have somewhat similar plots. There are also some allusions to Hamlet by William Shakespeare in the scene of play inside play including original text by Cyril Tourneur. The action more resembles a ballet than pirate adventures and the scenes of vengeful murders are symbolically histrionic and artfully conditional. It is quite interesting to compare this theatrical fantasy with Revenger's Tragedy by Alex Cox which is screened in the style of postmodern punk.

An artist's sketch

[Junta66 · 2/10 · 11 April 2007]

Whilst a few of the shots in this film may merit some fancy, the experience of watching this film from beginning to end is draining and unrewarding. As an experimental film that does not seek to tell a story nor make any impressive aesthetic propositions in the way of, say, David Lynch, it does well to stay in archives. Jacques Rivette is by all means a notable director whose films should be seen, but far from being an exemplary work of his, Noroît is a doodle made in the margin of his white list. At best it gives an insight into the director's character, and really should be out of bounds to anybody other than Rivette heavyweights.

A lack of a coherent narrative can be compensated for through other means such as through a Beckettian abstract aesthetic or through a Bergmanesque dreamscape. There are numerous films that sack story to discover the other facets of cinema but this one does not sincerely arrive at any kind of relevant revelation. With the liberty to fiddle with cameras and a cast Rivette works out what cinema can't achieve more than what it can. It's viewing interest is comparable to reading the private notes of an established artist or author to better understand how he comes to put together his more meritorious works.

That said, there are certain moments which suggest that Rivette is indeed trying to communicate with an audience and not just getting on with his personal pursuit. Bearing in mind that this film is adapted from a 5 act play, Rivette on occasion inserts the notion that the characters are conscious of the fact that they are actors. To begin with, realism or dramatic calibre of any other description is deliberately (I presume) humiliated by actors who, for example, shamelessly continue to breathe whilst lying dead on the ground. Also the script somewhat bizarrely alternates between French and high register English at times when they choose to honour the heavier lines of the original script. An infuriating cacophony emerging from the on-screen band of musical pirates provides the soundtrack for the pseudo-drama, which further reinforces the idea that this film consciously reflects its genre. Perhaps then, Noroît is a film about itself, and behind the chaos is a group of characters desperately trying to find themselves a narrative to fulfil their existence.

Still, this is a film that is very tiresome to sit through and even if the ideas outlined above were indeed Rivette's intentions there are works that portray them much more neatly. Noroît comes across as a tangled mishmash of propositions and is as pleasing as a beginner's violin scale practice.

As absorbingly singular as any of Rivette's films

[philosopherjack · 6 November 2020]

In Jacques Rivette's original conception, Noroit would have been one of a four-film series of linked Scenes de la vie parallele. In the event, only two of the films were made (Duelle was the other) and the film is most likely to be viewed now in the shadow of Rivette's towering achievement of a few years earlier, Celine and Julie Go Boating. Noroit shares many characteristics of that film - a focus on two women, a situation that clearly can't be taken "realistically," unexplained incursions of pure fantasy, to name just a few. But it's also explicitly an "adventure film," one of Rivette's most physical works, with much gunplay and fighting (although of an abstract, stylized variety), scenes of heavy lifting, and Bernadette Lafont strutting around in some outrageous costumes, and unlike Celine and Julie, the two central women here are adversaries, with Morag (Geraldine Chaplin) working as a bodyguard for pirate queen Giulia (Lafont) while plotting to kill her for revenge. If the film often feels like heavier going than Celine and Julie, that might be seen in part as an appropriate reflection of the subject matter and the stakes (it also reflects the explicit citations of a 17th century text, The Revengers' Tragedy, giving the film a foothold in classically disciplined theatricality). But it does mean that it becomes most satisfying in its final stretch, as it takes on the sense of trying to escape its bonds - dialogue yields to dance, the image flashes to black and white or to red as if the cinematic apparatus itself were becoming unstable, and one character demonstrates both previously unsuspected magical powers and the capacity to replicate herself. It's hard to imagine that Noroit is anyone's favourite Rivette film, but it's as absorbingly singular as any of them, in no way denying the validity of traditional pleasures, but incapable of presenting them passively or unquestioningly (even something as usually inherently "backgrounded" as soundtrack music is elevated here, several scenes showing us that the musicians are right there with the actors).