Something Old, Something New: Duelle/Spring Breakers

I finally caught up with Jacques Rivette's mysterious, beautiful Duelle this weekend and was instantly struck by how much it reminded me of Harmony Korine's new feature, Spring Breakers. A quartet of typed women establish themselves through and against a lone male figure who is whatever the women want him to be instead of the other way around. Korine's film, of course, aims for more social matters as his dream sinks into a strange hyperreality, while Rivette pushes his realist exteriors and initial class distinctions first into the realm of cinematic genre, then into dream itself. But both link up again in pushing their various binary distinctions until they collapse, but then, that makes them so much harder to describe.

My full piece is up now at Movie Mezzanine.