Last summer the Gene Siskel Film Center presented a new print of Celine and Julie Go Boating, perhaps the most beloved movie by French director Jacques Rivette. This week the Siskel will present one of Rivette’s lesser-known films, Le Pont du Nord (1981), also from a new print. If you’re unfamiliar with Rivette—likely the most challenging of all the French New Wave directors—this may be a good place to start. Reader emeritus Jonathan Rosenbaum argued as much in the early 80s, calling the film “a quixotic fairy tale” that hearkens back to the conspiratorial plots of Rivette’s earlier films while advancing a lighter, even fairy-tale tone. Pont du Nord, he wrote, “leads from such enchanted moments as Baptiste (Pascale Ogier) putting her capsized motorbike out of its misery—cutting a wire to stop its motor the way that a cowboy shoots his wounded horse . . . ending up in such fantasy realms as Baptiste’s weird, ‘naturalistic confrontations with a spider’s web spun out of a fiberglass sprayer and [a] children’s slide perceived as a dragon (which, incidentally exhales fire).” (This quote comes from a chapter of Rosenbaum’s Film: The Front Line, which is reprinted on his website.)