The legendary French director Jacques Rivette is almost eighty now, but age seems to be speeding up his internal clock; his newest film, The Duchess of Langeais is two hours and seventeen minutes long, which, coming from the man who made Out 1 (773 minutes in its "restored" version), La Belle noiseuse (236 minutes), L'Amour fou (252 minutes), and Celine and Julie Go Boating (193 minutes), is kind of like Martin Scorsese reading the Bible in ten minutes while on crack. Rivette's 2001 romantic comedy Va Savoir actually set off concerned muttering among long-time fans who were worried about him because he'd only managed to get 154 minutes of movie into theaters; everybody was greatly relieved when word got out that there was also a 220-minute director's cut that he'd love to show you. (The concept of the director's cut might have been invented with Rivette in mind; he recut the four-hour La Belle noiseuse into a two-hour-five-minute film that was released to theaters as Divertimento, though it was not explained why anyone would want a shorter version of a movie that largely consisted of Emmanuelle Béart standing around buck naked.)
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