Va savoir

I felt I should like this film more than I did. It is set in current day Paris where a theatre troupe is putting on a Italian production. The story revolves around a French actress in the troupe who is married to the director of the theatre group who is returning to Paris for the first time in years and still has unresolved feelings for an ex who resides in the city. The acting is solid if not very good, and the plot does hold interest and hangs together well. Having said this I could not help but feel the whole thing was somewhat slight and the payoff in time (it is or seemed like a very long movie) was somewhat unjustified. In some ways the characters seemed almost distant to me, they were real but I couldnt get inside their head, which in some ways is a silly criticism because life is like that and that is not necessarily a detraction for the film but I felt as though they were drifting through a series of set pieces with not all that much at stake. Having said this it is definitely worth a look and certainly should be sought if you enjoy cinema that goes beyond the pedestrian plot lines and pyrotechnics of all too many mainstream features today.

This is an interesting, yet at times boring movie. It is not boring necessarily because you get bored while watching, but it's because you don't get attached to any of the characters for a long time. There are two stories going on. They are intertwined. The story of the play that we don't understand much about, except seeing the possible alterego of our main woman character and also of course there is the story of these six individuals, three men and three women. They are all in search of something literally or symbolically.

While watching this film, you might pause, have some dinner, go back, continue. The phone rings, you forget about it, start watching again, and fall asleep. The next morning, you wake up, decide to watch, you think of looking it up at IMDb and you just do that. Throughout the film, there is a huge amount of feeling going back and forth, but we all (together with the director, the movie cast and the crew) watch it all happen as if it's not even happening. In a way, the movie is too French-cool, which also makes it unique. This attachment I am talking about, because of its non-existence, you might just end up finishing the film in three days, but maybe the more crucial thing is that no matter what, you do wanna go back and see what's haunting you. You can't let go. In a way, that's exactly what the main character feels. She can't let go either. There is something calm about her, something serene. We are not impressed at first, but slowly she becomes a goddess of determination and genuineness. Yet, there is something that triggers her mind and it steals her peace.

Luckily as time goes on, we observe her internal-peace-movement. In this sense, this movie is either very successful and it gave me the exact feeling, or maybe I am overly empathetic : )

It did take me 3 days to watch, with numerous interruptions of daily life, and I even stopped watching now and started writing this review.

Yes, I do not know the ending yet. Do watch it, if you are someone who does a lot of thinking about the complexities of interpersonal relationships (especially about romantic ones), but make sure you are patient, interested, and ready to think.

The film's heroine, Camille, a French stage actress left Paris three years ago and found success in Torino, Italy where she became a lead actress for the theater company. She also became a lover of Ugo, a famous stage director. She returns back to Paris with Ugo and his company to act in Italian as a main character in Pirandello's "As You Desire Me", the play that explores the mysteries of identity and memory. While in Paris, Camille confronts her past life and Pierre, the man whom she loved and still can't forget. I found Camille's character (as played by Jeanne Balibar, the stage actress and a dancer) very interesting. She may not be likable in a beginning but she is talented and every character in the movie after watching her performing at the stage leaves with the feelings that they've witnessed something very special. Camille changes as the movie progresses and in the end she becomes like a sister or close friend to both Celine and Julie. Her every movement, gesture, the way she walks, smiles, turns her head, speaks in two languages changing the timbre of her voice are true marvels to watch and to listen to.

Ugo tries to find in the Paris libraries the lost but existing play by the Italian dramatist of 18th century, Carlo Goldoni and is helped by an intelligent and beautiful young student, Dominique or Do and they both seem to have developed some special feelings for each other. Dominique has a half-brother, Arthur who is in love with Sonja, a new woman in Pierre's life or is he in love with Sonja's exquisite jewelry? Do and Arthur have a mother, Madame Desprez who has inherited the library of the rare and priceless old books but she does not sell them, she keeps them as a memory of her first husband. Sonja, Pierre's girlfriend seems to bring the peace and happiness in Pierre's life after Camille was gone but she, too, had a mystery in her rather wild past for which a marvelous ring, an object of Arthur's desire serves as a reminder.

I like "Va savoir" a lot - it is so well constructed and absolutely Rivettesque and it made me smile all the time. It is long (as usual for Rivette's films) but elegantly relaxed. It moves well with its own wonderful pace and we enjoy leisure walkings and spend time with many old and rare books. We feel longing that is in the air - all six characters desire something and someone. We notice once again how much Rivette likes his characters sitting on the park bench where the magic events begin happening to them. We go through many wonderful sequences, ironic, dramatic, and lyrical and in the end we are awarded by the finale which is truly grand and theatrical in the best sense. After all the movie could be viewed as Rivette's love letter to theater. Va Savoir? Who knows?

A light Rivette; Va Savoir (2001) is a film that features many of the director's most recognisable traits and characteristics familiar from the unwieldy and progressive films that he made in the late 1960's and early 1970's, but done in such a way as to suggest a more frivolous or throwaway tone with the emphasis placed more squarely on the elements of comedy and farce. This doesn't necessarily mean that the film is bad, or that it fails in some way to compare to the more iconic likes of Paris nous appartient (1960), L'amour fou (1969), Out 1 (1971) and Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) - all of which are referenced here - but rather, that it shows a process of simplification; with Rivette taking his chosen themes - such as performance, miscommunication and the battle of the sexes - and allowing the characters to take precedence over the story, as opposed to the experiments with the film-making form. Perhaps this is emblematic of Rivette's more recent work over the last twenty years, though having only seen La Belle Noiseuse (1991) from his post Celine and Julie projects (admittedly missing out on a great deal of the man's career), I can only make the obvious comparisons.

Nonetheless, the relative simplicity and emphasis on character worked well here; with Rivette keenly following the trials and tribulations of a small collection of characters all bumbling about the woes of modern relationship difficulties from an upper-middle class perspective. Along the way we have the usual self-reflexive comments on the nature of performance and of film-making itself, with the story revolving around an Italian-language production of Luigi Pirandello's "As You Desire Me" that the central couple are appearing in. In some respects the film reminded me of the work of Woody Allen, with the ensemble nature of the narrative and the film's social milieu suggesting elements of Hannah and her Sisters (1986), Husbands and Wives (1994) and the more recent Melinda and Melinda (2004), while the idea of a play (or film) that is both a part of the story and also a subtle comment on it reminded me of Stardust Memories (1980), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1984) and Bullets Over Broadway (1994). As with those particular films, Va Savoir offers a narrative in which the subtle juxtaposition of the characters thoughts, feelings and social interactions creates a comedy of errors to undercut many of the more dramatic or self-consciously self-reflexive elements of the film.

As ever with Rivette - or at least the work of his that I've so far seen - the film moves perfectly between the various characters and their roles and interactions, as the skillful sense of choreography between the different layers of the narrative and the impeccable comic-performances of the cast help to draw us in to the story and lead us towards that quietly brilliant final act. I can certainly understand why many would dislike the film; it's long, deals exclusively in character interaction (on at least two separate levels) and creates a world that is stuffy and intellectual, no doubt seemingly horribly pretentious to those unwilling to spend more than thirty minutes with these characters or the world that Rivette creates. Regardless, I personally think that Va Savoir is a fine film; both intelligent and entertaining and with that spark and spirit so recognisable in the director's work from Paris nous appartient to the celebrated Celine and Julie.

Some years ago Sophie Marceau explained her move to Hollywood in more or less the following terms: I am tired of doing the same French movies where all in all there is a love triangle and in the end the three of them have dinner together. Well, Va savoir is exactly that kind of movie. It is more complicated because there are actually four love triangles, but yes, they all have a cake to share in the end; all the six people who were involved in the triangles. So nothing new here. The good thing, however, are the characters. Except for the brother-and-sister duo who are kind of stereotypical and possibly present the spectator with the cliché of male and female libertine Parisians, the other two couples arouse our curiosity with their insufficiencies: Camille is a little too absent-minded to be completely sane, Pierre is a typical academic dork who falls into furies of sophisticated frustration, Ugo visibly carries the burden of his unattractive appearance and compensates for it with his thick Italian accent, while Sonia obstinately tries to keep to the level of those intellectual pricks and prove how much more she knows about real life. This is a good melodrama if you like the genre. I do, and I liked it. Marceau probably wouldn't.