Customer Reviews

Va Savoir

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

'Va Savoir' opens with a voice in the darkness asking for lights to be turned on a stage, and the entire film can be seen as a play or a celebration of play, of acting, role-playng, creating, stories, plots. the two lead characters are actors, and in their forking narratives, bring everyone they come in contact with into their theatrical orbit. Camille is the French lead actress with an Italian touring company who are performing Pirandello's 'As You Desire Me' (the story of the amnesiac mistress of a writer who treats her like one of his creations, filmed by Hollywood with Garbo (another Camille) and Stroheim) in Paris to general indifference. During her hours off, she seeks the lover she dumped three years previously, a sheepish philosophy professsor now living with a domineering ballet teacher.

her co-star and company director Ugo, whose precise relation to Camille we don't learn until near the end, spends his days searching for an unpublished, possibly apocryphal play by his 18th century compatriot Goldoni. this paper chase leads him to the beautiful student Do, whose mother's library may hold the key, and who is instantly smitten by the older man. her brother is used to pilfering valuable books to fund his gambling habit. these two plots, intercut with apparent crudeness early on, begin to interweave to comical, romantic and magical effect, distending its mysteries and crime narrative, collapsing into a farce of dizzyingly shifting relationships and a vertiginous mock duel. 'Va Savoir' creates an enchanted world that looks superficially like ours, but operates on completely alien principles.

Jacques Rivette is one of cinema's great fabulists, but he doesn't depend for his fantasy on special effects or the literally supernatural. Every scene, even the long excerpts from the play, are filmed with plausibility and an air-brushed realism. It is in plot development that Rivette's fantasy lies. having begun the film with rehearsals for a drama, Rivette proliferates confusions between reality and illusion. there isn't a single sequence in the entire film that doesn't have characters walking down corridors, streets or paths, or walking into rooms, but these everyday events are transformed, corridors become labyrinths or secret passageways, rooms become magic chambers or dungeons, rooftops the plains of undiscovered planets. People dreaming becoming creating authors, mirrors portals to another dimension. The emphasis is on characters seeking to affirm their identity, but continually transforming, metamorphosing, renegotiating. Allusions abound, as often distracting the viewer as enlightening the theme.

'Va Savoir' plays like 'Celine and Julie go boating' (Rivette's most famous film) updated, with the theatre as haunted house, caretakers Camille and Ugo releasing all kinds of ghosts from the past. it is also similar to Bergman movies like 'the Face' or 'Fanny and alexander', their plot-displaced climaxes extended over an entire film. If Rivette has decided to charm his audience rather than challenge it, it is somehow appropriate that in this age of infantile, no-attention-span cinema, the most adventurous, enjoyable and youthful film in years is made by a 73 year old.

Va Savoir (Who Knows?) the newest film by Jacques Rivette, one of the pioneers of the French New Wave, opened this year's New York Film Festival to great effect. A delightfully small comedy that follows the lives of six people in modern day Paris, this is the sort of film that is laden with subtleties of character and action that might be missed if it were viewed amidst a quagmire of several other films.

The film begins on a stage as, Camille, an actress (Jeanne Balibar) talks to an empty crowd about her anxieties. She feels afraid of the world, and lacks will to go on. Soon, we find that the reason is her disenchantment with her current lover/director, Ugo. We find that she has returned to Paris, her home, for the first time in three years, and has left behind an ex named Pierre (who is still humorously working on the same thesis three years later). Pierre is currently married to Sonia, a dance instructor, that is being courted by Arthur, the half-brother of Do, a student whom happens to be helping Ugo search for a lost manuscript. There is a great deal of interplay in the film between the characters before we discover their relationships to each other, and that is the film's most tedious aspect. There is a willing suspension of disbelief required to accept that these relationships all flow into each other the way that they do, and the film takes its time in establishing them.

Once it does establish who is who, however, the film absolutely takes off. The film is a comedy, but rarely relies on outright gags for laughs. The majority of the humor lies in the shifting motivations of the characters. For example, in one early scene, Camille, who feels embarrassed for the way her partner Ugo acted during the previous night's dinner, goes to apologize to her hostess, Sonia. Sonia, however, due to her own marital difficulties, naturally assumes that Camille has come to apologize for the behavior of her husband, Pierre. When Camille begins to apologize, Sonia starts making excuses for Pierre's actions (which actually left Camille once again enamored with him). Camille decides to alter her strategy here though, so she can better make a play at Pierre. The subtleties of the contradictions in their actions are what we derive our pleasure from. This might sound terribly convoluted, but on screen it plays out simply and humorously.

As the characters continue to flip-flop the object of their affection, nearly every scene takes on such lightly comic dimensions. Never do we feel that their decisions don't make sense, though, as Rivette has composed a script that allows us to always justify and understand each character's impetus. By essentially limiting his cast to six members, he allows us, over the film's two and a half hour running time, to grow to know each of them intimately. During the run of the play, each of the characters comes to watch the play. We see a key scene from the production as each of them is affected by it differently, and viewing the play causes each to, once again, alter the way they see the other characters. In Rivette's film, art doesn't imitate life, but rather inspires it. The film's take on art, like its take on relationships, is more mature and realistic than we see in most films. Much to my delight, in Va Savoir, the characters actually think before they act, which is much rarer than one would suspect in films.

Although billed as a romantic comedy, Jacques Rivettes' relatively terse 1990 film "Va Savoir" ("Who Knows?") focuses on the priority of obsession over romance. At a few critical junctures, the tension breaks and we are allowed a nervous laugh before it resumes.

I found the whole drama oddly compelling. This is much the same reaction as I had to "The Venus Beauty Institute". And "Va Savoir" is every bit as pointless. Its two and a half hour running time allows for as many pregnant pauses as bon mots. I neither liked nor understood any of the characters, who were alternatively morose and manic. Their introversion evokes the claustrophobic feeling of the staged play within a play, Luigi Pirandello's "As You Desire Me".

The plot involves an actress Camille (Jeanne Balibar), who is returning to her native Paris after three years in the Italian theatre company directed by her Italian lover Ugo (Sergio Castellitto). She becomes re-acquainted with her previous lover in Paris, a Heidegger-obsessed professor of philosophy (Jacques Bonaffe), who is living in their former apartment with an ex-con ballet-teaching feng-shui practicing lover Sonia (Marianne Basler). Meanwhile, Ugo seeks out a manuscript to a lost play, crossing the path of a literature student/ingenue Do (Helene de Fougerolles), in one of the the most photogenic libraries encountered since "A Name of the Rose". Do's mysterious, ladies man of a brother Arthur (Bruno Todeschini) becomes involved shortly thereafter. The rest of the movie sees the various characters face off alone (yes, they're all deeply conflicted, even with themselves), one on one, or in groups. All the loose ends are summarily tied up or discarded in a grand finale on stage, a contrivance on a par with the Marx Brothers' "Coconuts".

(Note: I watched this with English subtitles and I speak neither French nor Italian.)

I found this movie thoroughly enjoyable. The story line is simple and, in some way, rather unimportant - Camille, a well-known Parisian actress, is returning from Rome to act in front of her home audience in a play directed by her new lover Ugo. The play is Pirandello's Come Tu Mi Vuoi, a classical work (written for his lover Martha Abba) about a woman pinned between the yin and yang forces of reality and illusion. Throughout the film Rivette switches his camera between the play and Camille and Ugo's "reality" as if to ask us who are the real Camille and Ugo. What do they really want? What makes them tick? Can I, the spectator, enter their scriptless universe? Rivette (and his excellent actors) show us that delicateness can be robust and inventive, that desire for another can never be fulfilled and yet that the fulfillment does not really matter, because in the process of the struggle to achieve it we become alive and creative. What matters is style; style is substance. We are also treated to a brilliant depiction of the incestuous relationship between the Italians and the French and there is a delicious succession of nuances, hints and plays with the national stereotypes that brought many a smile to my face.

I can see why some - those used to Hollywood cliches with their happy endings and oh so predictable plots - might not find the movie to be that hot. Well, that's just too bad....

This film runs 154 minutes which is about the length of most epics. This however is not an epic and though an excellent story(once it gets going)it will tire and try the patience of even the most devoted Rivette loyalists. I like this film and am glad to have stayed the course with it but Rivette could have given us filmgoers a little more to look at(most shots are interiors of hotels or apartments) for those 2 1/2 hours. That said this film in every other way succeeds and on a very high level.
The story: In true new wave fashion the movie has no real starting point. The characters are at first met at some distance as we see them in their professional roles as actors. Slowly we see them in more relaxed settings and slowly we get to know them. The key word is slowly because for all the attention that must be paid the true payoffs don't start coming til approximately half way through the movie. It takes Rivette awhile (perhaps too long) to set up all the various situations/relationships but once set up the movies pace picks up. The lead actress plays a leading actress and how you feel about this movie will largely be determined by how you feel about her because everything pivots around her. The actress is not particualarly attractive and it takes awhile to begin to find her fascinating but she is that. In love with her director and in love with her ex her main emotion is indeciciveness. Not passion nor desire or anything excting just uncertainty. Interestingly however the other characters are equally indecisive. They are all indecisive in a different way and that makes this film farcical even though you rarely find yourself laughing at this human comedy. What is most memorable about the picture is how well eacg character is brought to us. Rivette is great with detail and nuance and you have to be with a picture like this. Every character has some aspect which will capture your interest and though the plot does not take you anywhere there is an arrival at the end. An arrival at a kind of understanding that allows for peoples complexities to coexist and that makes this film experience a very civilized one. Rivette makes insightful use of the theatre in Va Savoir. The theatre is the place we ask the big questions about love and identity but life is not written out for us ahead of time so life is the even more uncertain cinema-theatre we actors all occupy. Rivette finds both art and life are richest when in most intimate contact with one another. In the end you will feel enlivened by that spirit of understanding and glad to have given your time to this epic length look at intimacy.

This French romantic comedy kept my interest mostly due to the twists of the various relationships and the overall fine performances by the cast. The plot/story was hard for me to follow until 30-40 minutes into the movie due to 2 factors: (1) the frequent changes between the scenes of the touring play and the off-stage lives of the main characters with the other members of the cast and (2) the very slow pace of the first part of the story. I found Jeanne Balibar's & Sergio Castellito's performances to be excellent, and that helped me to accept more easily the ambiguity of the story line. I liked the film so much that when I finished watching it once, I watched the first 30-40 minutes of it again so I could enjoy that part of the film more than I did on my first viewing. While that worked for me, I consider it to be a shortcoming of the film in general. I also think that I would have enjoyed the film more if it had been carefully edited to be about 30 minutes shorter.

Va Savoir is one of my favorite international films. The humor alone always gets me. It's not a comedy nor a "dramedy." It's just about human relationships. Sure, all movies are about human relationships. However, this movie's narrative is compelling and the chemistry between the actors makes it humorous. Everything takes place around or behind a play. The main characters are actors in a traveling theatre troupe. The director and leading lady are stereotypically in love. However, it seems that their love is more an enduring friendship than a physical affair. All of the main characters are searching for something. If it is not a long lost play by an Italian playwright it's long lost dreams...

I had to write a review after seeing some of the reviews already given. I guess it comes down to if you can appreciate beauty, and can appreciate just that. This is a very long film, and throughout the whole of it there are no explosions or guns, or heroes etc. Simply a beautiful and idyllic feast for the eyes of France and romance.

At 154 (!) minutes, "Va Savoir" could use about about 40+ minutes of judicious editing. I'm open to French cinematic experiences - there's nothing like the thrill of discovering gems like "Read My Lips" or "The Dinner Game" - but at 2 hours 30 minutes plus, director Jacques Rivette here strains the patience of even the most hardened of cinephiles.

That's not to say it isn't fun to watch Jeanne Balibar ooze her way across the screen - she's such a silky-smooth, enchanting presence. And it's a treat to see Sergio Castellitto, who was spectacular in the winning 'Mostly Martha.' And how about an actor who can play leads in German (as he did in 'Martha') and Italian and French (he does both with aplomb here in 'Va Savoir')? This is one talented guy. But condensing the film down to a tighter 1 hr 45 minutes would have greatly increased the viewing experience.

Also, viewers should take care not to get freaked out during the first 1 - 2 minutes of the film. It's in Italian, and the filmmakers (or its distributors?) don't start the subtitling until Camille (Balibar, on stage in the film, emoting in Italian) steps off stage and out of character and says "In French now." And, viola, at that point the subtitles kick in. It's a cute little effect, but it'll drive you crazy with your clicker if you're not aware of it.

This French ensemble romantic comedy revolves around six people who lie, cheat and steal their way around Paris over the course of several increasingly zany days, culminating in a duel. The fact that it takes place in the present day should give you an idea of how kooky the characters become! All six of them (three men and three women) are connected to one another somehow, and over the course of putting on a play they manage to get into more nutty situations than you can shake a baguette at. It's quite funny and a very light foray into the cheerful world of romance and Paris. Worth watching if you can find a copy.