La Bande des quatre (The Gang of Four). 1989. France/Switzerland. Directed by Jacques Rivette. Screenplay by Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent. With Bulle Ogier, Benoît Régent, Fejria Deliba. 4K restoration courtesy Cohen Film Collection. In French, Portuguese; English subtitles. 160 min.
After decades of making movies that radically experiment with storytelling and performance, Jacques Rivette and Bulle Ogier banded together one last time on Gang of Four, which takes an 18th-century comedy of disguise and romance, Marivaux’s La Double inconstance, as the play-within-the-film—a sly nod to the playful structural conceit of their first collaboration in 1969, L’Amour fou, and to their ensuing years of life and creativity. A conspiratorial unease hangs over *Gang of Four*—the title itself alludes, curiously, to an ill-fated political faction of die-hard Maoists during China’s Cultural Revolution—and the film unfolds as a series of puzzling entanglements involving four acting students, all of them young women, who discover through their Svengali-like teacher (Bulle Ogier) the uses of enchantment both on stage and in their private lives.