General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Story of Marie and Julien

The Story of Marie and Julien (French: Histoire de Marie et Julien) is a 2003 French-Italian drama film directed by Jacques Rivette, in which a watchmaker's blackmail scheme becomes a supernatural love story with the woman he lost a year earlier. It stars Emmanuelle Béart as Marie, Jerzy Radziwilowicz as Julien, and Anne Brochet as Madame X, and runs about 150 minutes.¹ The film is unusual in its history: Rivette first began shooting it in the summer of 1975 with Albert Finney and Leslie Caron, abandoned it after two days when he suffered a breakdown, and revived it nearly three decades later from the notes of his then-assistant, Claire Denis.²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Jacques Rivette; screenplay by Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, and Christine Laurent¹
Cast	Emmanuelle Béart (Marie), Jerzy Radziwilowicz (Julien), Anne Brochet (Madame X), Nicole Garcia, Bettina Kee¹
Production	Pierre Grise Productions, producer Martine Marignac; France-Italy, 2003, 150 min, 35 mm¹
Crew	Cinematography William Lubtchansky, editing Nicole Lubtchansky; pre-existing music Blossom Dearie, "Our day will come"¹
Release	France and Belgium 12 November 2003; Luxembourg 28 November 2003³
Origin	Aborted 1975 shoot with Albert Finney and Leslie Caron, stopped on the third day by Rivette's nervous breakdown²
Cycle	Third of a planned four-film cycle, first called Les filles du feu, later Scènes de la vie parallèle²

Spoilers

Plot

Julien, a 40-year-old watchmaker with destructive impulses, repairs clocks in his half-empty house and decides to blackmail the wealthy Madame X, whose traffic in antique objects he has uncovered.⁴ What he does not know is the more dangerous secret that links Madame X to Marie, a woman with whom he had fallen in love a year earlier and who has reappeared as inexplicably as she vanished.⁴

Marie moves in with Julien, and their love intensifies, but she seems incapable of normal physical feeling, alternating between passion and an icy numbness, as if she came from a world where time has no value.⁵ Julien, a man used to measuring everything by the hands of a clock, tries to crack the mystery and free her from it; together they reach a place ruled by love without limits, where questions of life and death do not exist.⁴ The Karlovy Vary festival synopsis notes that the film builds its tension by turning an everyday environment into a deceptive labyrinth containing magic elements.⁵

The 1975 project and its collapse

The cycle. In the mid-1970s Rivette, struck by two books on Celtic mythology by Claude Gaignebet and Jean Markale, set out to shoot four linked films with the aim of "creating new myths"; the cycle was first called Les filles du feu and later Scènes de la vie parallèle.² By the summer of 1975 he had completed Duelle and Noroît and was preparing Marie et Julien, the third part.²

Casting and preparation. Rivette cast Albert Finney, then one of the prominent British stage and screen actors, and went to Los Angeles to recruit Leslie Caron.² The story took shape in discussions between the director and his actors, in which his assistant Claire Denis took part; even at the first day of shooting, the film still lacked an ending.² Denis wrote up these discussions as what Rivette called a "continuité technique", a technical continuity intended for the production team and the shooting schedule.⁶

The breakdown. To save time, Rivette had the cinematographer Willy Lubtchansky set up what he called the most complicated shot possible, a 360-degree exterior move taking in a café terrace and the elevated metro; a day was spent preparing it and a day shooting it. On the morning of the third day Rivette arrived on set unable to work, describing it as a classic nervous breakdown.² In a 1987 Cahiers du Cinéma exchange on abandoned projects, he called the film his greatest regret as a filmmaker and his greatest remorse as a director, toward Caron and Finney, whom he had abandoned at the start of their common adventure.⁶ A scholarly account adds that the 1975 project, written with Eduardo de Gregorio under the title Marie et Julien, was inspired by the revenante story of Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958).⁷

Revival and the 2003 film

Denis's text was published in 2002, with two other unproduced Rivette scenarios, under the title Trois films-fantômes ("Three phantom films"). Rereading the proofs gave Rivette the idea of taking the project up again; he said he realized that Marie was gradually taking on in his mind the silhouette, gaze, and voice of an actress he had worked with about ten years earlier, Emmanuelle Béart.⁶ From that mysterious text, which contains the note "(PS. ne pas oublier le geste interdit)" ("do not forget the forbidden gesture") without explaining the gesture, Rivette wrote L'Histoire de Marie et Julien with Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent, saying that the films he had made since 1975 had helped him solve what had remained an enigma at the time.²

The 2003 film keeps several collaborators from Rivette's earlier work: Radziwilowicz had starred in Secret défense (1997), Nicole Garcia had been directed by Rivette in Duelle (1976), and Béart had played in La Belle Noiseuse (1991).⁶ Rivette also used a digital effect for the first time in his cinema, for a single shot.² The film was presented in official selection at the San Sebastián International Film Festival.⁶

Reception and interpretation

French critical response was divided. AlloCiné's aggregation of 19 press reviews gives an average of 3.6 out of 5.⁸ Cahiers du Cinéma praised the film as a profound anatomy of the amorous bond and noted that Rivette filmed erotic scenes for the first time, while Télérama found the fantastico-romantic scenario repetitive and slow.⁸ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 62% Tomatometer score from 13 reviews.⁹

A depression reading. In Screen (2014), Guy Austin, a film scholar at Newcastle University, proposed an allegorical reading of the film not as the received supernatural romance but as a portrayal of depression, drawing on Julia Kristeva's Black Sun and on Abraham and Torok's work on how depression manifests in cultural forms; he argues the film exemplifies cinema's potential role as what Kristeva calls a "counter-depressant".¹⁰ The Rotterdam festival program, by contrast, located the film's emotional core in the horror genre, reading it as a fear of what was not done and of dying.⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026