Merry-Go-Round

Merry-Go-Round (1981)

New Yorker Ben Phillips and mysterious Léo Hoffmann are strangers who are summoned to Paris by a mutual acquaintance. Upon arrival, they meet and soon find themselves tangled in a complex mystery.

Date of release
1981-10-08
TMDB
7.2 / 10 (18)
Runtime
2h 40m
Genres
Mystery, Drama, Crime
Director
Jacques Rivette

Casting

Interesting facts

Merry-Go-Round is a 1981 French experimental mystery directed by Jacques Rivette, starring Maria Schneider and Joe Dallesandro. The film, which revolves around a kidnapping plot, follows a structure similar to that of a crime drama. The script was written by Rivette in collaboration with Eduardo de Gregorio and Suzanne Schiffman, with dialogue by de Gregorio. Filming took place in 1977, but the film remained unreleased until 1981.

Production

During the 1970s, Jacques Rivette worked with producer Stéphane Tchalgadjieff on Scènes de la vie parallèle, a projected four-film series which focused on enigmatic, supernatural stories. Of the four films, only the first two, Duelle and Noroît, were completed, with Rivette suffering a nervous breakdown on the second day of filming the third one, Histoire de Marie et Julien (which he eventually remade in 2003).

Rivette and Maria Schneider had already considered working together before; the idea of Merry-Go-Round emerged after Schneider told Rivette that she would be interested in working with Joe Dallesandro. Rivette used the encounter between the two actors as a pretext for setting a story in motion.

Though Rivette had met Scheider before starting this project, he didn't really know either of the actors one month before shooting began. Principal photography began in 1977. The story was largely improvised and aspects were developed due to the difficult shooting conditions. Both lead actors were struggling at the time with drug addictions, with Schneider also undergoing severe emotional problems.

Schneider eventually left production without completing her scenes, with actress Hermine Karagheuz (who had previously appeared in Duelle) filling in for her during the scenes that featured Dallesandro running in the forest. Dallesandro later said, about this part of the production : "They kept shooting these scenes where I was running. Running, running, running. It got so bad that I wasn't even aware Maria had left the picture.

Rivette managed to edit the footage he had shot into a 2h30 film, but the finished product was found unsuitable for release by Gaumont. The film was only released in 1981 in Germany, and did not receive a general release in France - to lukewarm reviews - until 1983. At that point, Rivette had already rebuilt his career thanks to the release of Le Pont du Nord (1981).

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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