It all began (as things Rivettian tend to do) auspiciously enough. There were to be four films in a series originally entitled Les Filles du Feu (after Gerard de Nerval) before the more expansive Scenes de la vie parallele replaced it. Each would center on a “non-existent myth” of a battle between goddesses of the sun and the moon for a mysterious blue diamond that has the power to make mortals immortal and vice versa. Each film was to be in a different genre: a film noir, a pirate adventure, a love story, and finally a musical – the last-mentioned of whose scenario particulars hadn’t been completely worked out when the four-film project went into production. Two films were ultimately completed – Duelle (the film noir) and Noroit (1976, the pirate adventure). But two days into the shooting of the third, Histoire de Marie et Julien the metteur en scène (as Rivette always chose to call himself, auteurism be damned) suffered a nervous breakdown, and the entire project fell apart – though traces of it linger in Merry-Go-Round (1981, a paranoid conspiracy jape that has everything but the goddesses) and the semi-demi-musical Haut/Bas/Fragile (1995).

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Chéreau’s staging, it’s more than sufficient to contemplate its impact on Duelle. Our innocent heroine (Hermine Karaghuez instantly recalling Betty Schneider in Paris nous appartient) recites lines from Cocteau’s play as a kind of incantation, much as Geraldine Chaplin reads lines from Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy in Noroit. But that reworking of Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet and Tourneur’s (Jacques bien sur) Anne of the Indies (1951) is enacted on a rocky island of no temporal or spatial specificity. Duelle takes place in an eerily unpopulated Paris in a perpetual twilight (the neo-Joycean Twhylight is the film’s alternate title) where it always seems to be just before dawn. The settings are completely real, yet appear to have been created in order for Rivette to discover them: an aquarium out of The Lady From Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947), a jardins des plantes redolent of greenhouse at the start of The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), a dance club called Le Rhumba out of Criss Cross (Robert Siodmak, 1949), and a ballet classroom that evokes Pandora’s Box (G.W. Pabst, 1929) – with Berto in a hairdo (and accompanying manner) remindful of Valeska Gert in Renoir’s Nana (1926). Most important of all there’s Jean Weiner - a composer who has lent his talents to films by Renoir, Duvivier, Franju and Bresson. But what he’s here for is to recall his days as a pianist at Cocteau’s favorite hang-out Le Boeuf sur le Toit. And thus he is live on the set spinning out improvisations in numerous scenes in the film’s first three quarters – with the characters treating his visible presence as no more noteworthy than any other aspect of the setting. While he’s joined by a small ensemble to serve as the pit band in the scenes at Le Rhumba, it’s other moments that stand out – particularly his last at the dance class, where Berto sends a hopelessly diamond-addicted Garcia on her way into an alley where snow is gently falling.

And this in turn leads to the inevitable question: what is this all about anyway. Well surely it’s about death. And drugs. And style – in a way that hasn’t been seen on screen since the heyday of Sternberg and Dietrich. And it’s about Rivette doing a “complete 180” from the improvisatory extremes of Out 1: Noli me tangere (1971) and Céline et Julie vont en bateau/Phantom Ladies Over Paris (1974). But in the last analysis Duelle is about what all the greatest of the great are about – the siren call of cinema itself.