Sérail (1976) which has recently come out on a French DVD from Les films du paradoxe is like a hybrid of Rivette and Ruiz (with a smattering of Robbe-Grillet) and stars Corin Redgrave and Leslie Caron with Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier in the Rivettian roles of blonde and brunette in a house which is a house of fiction, a sinister funhouse in which an English author gets lost and perhaps entombed as he has passed to the other side of the mirror and is observing his own life as created at his typewriter in a devouring mise-an-abîme. The house is a threshold between its virtual instantiations: walls, windows, furniture, drapery and furnishings transform themselves alternately into presence and absence as two women play out an intrigue with Caron overseeing and orchestrating a snare of uncertain nature on a victim who may merely have conceived all of this as a work of fiction, or as a pathological projection. Claire Denis worked as first assistant director on the film as she was to have done on Rivette’s abandoned project ‘Marie et Julien’ (which was also to have starred Caron, playing opposite Albert Finney) while the Argentinian director Eduardo de Gregorio was also a collaborator of Rivette’s at the time the film was made.
