"Va Savoir"

The world's least-known great filmmaker finally makes a movie everyone gets to see. Too bad it's only dazzling.

By Charles Taylor

Sep 28, 2001 | For years now, whenever I've had a chance to write about a Jacques Rivette movie, I've made sure to call the French director the world's least-known great filmmaker, hoping I could push people to take a chance on his movies or hunt down the ones released on video. Rivette's movies have been released here so spottily, if at all, that it's heartening that his new film, "Va Savoir," is getting a major art-house release through Sony Pictures Classics. After being lauded at the Cannes Film Festival last May, "Va Savoir" has been chosen as the opening night selection of this year's New York Film Festival and opens commercially the next day. With a body of work that includes his masterpiece "Celine and Julie Go Boating" (the movies' greatest meditation on the meaning and pleasure of narrative), the wonderful 1994 musical "Haut/bas/fragile," "La Belle Noiseuse," and the two-part Joan of Arc epic "Jeanne le Pucelle," Rivette, who is now 73, deserved this acclaim years ago. Those of us who have loved his movies feel like we are finally able to spill a secret we've wanted to share for years.

All of his themes are contained in "Va Savoir": the intersection between theater and life; old houses that hold secrets that they may never give up; the fact that there's more pleasure to be had in pursuing a mystery than in solving it; the caprices of love; the way women act as each other's instinctive allies. And so are his preoccupations: women so beautiful you break into a grin just looking at them; old books; walks in leafy Paris parks; sunshine; the theater; characters who possess intuition verging on clairvoyance.

I don't think I'd trust anyone who looked at "Va Savoir" and didn't see it as the work of a master. This love rondelet involving six characters who uncouple and recouple moves with both grace and mathematical precision. It possesses the lightness that comes only when a filmmaker has come close to pulling off the insanely complicated, and as such it's one of the few movies that truly deserves to be called Mozartean.

Why, then, don't I feel more enthusiastic about it? I suspect because while the movie is formally dazzling, it's emotionally and dramatically a bit small. There's nothing wrong with a director's wanting to make a trifle (and a trifle by Jacques Rivette only means it's better than 95 percent of what you'll see at the movies this year). What's most enjoyable in the film is the sleight of hand with which Rivette brings his disparate strands together, rather than what his artistry makes us feel for the characters. You can be amazed at "Va Savoir" and still feel emotionally connected to it only intermittently.

Theater and life have blurred so consistently in Rivette's film it's fitting that the new film opens in darkness, with a spotlight locating an actress on the stage. She's Camille (Jeanne Balibar), a Frenchwoman who fled Paris after her affair with the philosopher Pierre (Jacques Bonnaffé) became suffocating. Camille has been living in Italy, where she's acting with a theater troupe and living with the troupe's director, the droopy-eyed charmer Ugo (Sergio Castellitto -- imagine if Serge Gainsbourg had a younger brother who learned personal hygiene). Camille has returned to Paris with the company's production of Pirandello's "As You Desire Me." She fears seeing Pierre but can't keep herself away, turning up at his apartment and meeting his wife, Sonia (Marianne Basler), and hunting him down in the park where he goes every morning to read the paper.

While Camille is circling around Pierre, Ugo is hunting down a rumored unpublished play by the 18th-century Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni. An autograph expert leads him to a private library where the manuscript may reside. The lady of the house (Catherine Rouvel) has no interest in the books, keeping them as a sign of loyalty to her dead husband. But her daughter Domnique ("Do" for short, and played by a stunning ray of sunshine named Hélenè de Fougerolles), smitten with Ugo, undertakes to become his assistant. One of the complications they face is Do's half-brother, Arthur (Bruno Todeschini), a ne'er-do-well who, chronically short of money, occasionally purloins a title to sell. He also may be having an affair with Do. He is trying to have an affair with Sonia.

When Rivette was a critic for "Cahiers du Cinema" he wrote appreciatively of Howard Hawks. And though the two -- a Hollywood dandy specializing in tales of male bonding, and a French cinephile intellectual enchanted by women and the process of narrative -- might seem worlds apart, Hawks has clearly been an important influence on Rivette's long, deceptively random style. In Hawks' best films the plots are either episodic and inconsequential ("Rio Bravo," "To Have and Have Not" and "Only Angles Have Wings") or so insanely complicated that they become inconsequential to enjoying the films ("Bringing Up Baby" and "The Big Sleep"). What does occupy Hawks' attention are the performers he uses (he was always happy to abandon the plot and let somebody sing: Hoagy Carmichael in "To Have and Have Not," Ricky Nelson and Dean Martin in "Rio Bravo").

The critic James Harvey once wrote that the relaxed performances in "Rio Bravo" achieved the status of "pure behaving," in other words, behavior that was completely natural and relaxed in front of the camera. The length of a movie like "Rio Bravo" can't be justified by its simple plot any more than the epic lengths of Rivette movies can be justified by their plots. (At two and a half hours, "Va Savoir" is relatively short; "Celine and Julie" runs three hours and 20 minutes, "La Belle Noiseuse" four hours, "Haut/bas/fragile" two hours and 50 minutes, the uncut "Out One" 12 hours and 40 minutes.) But Rivette's elastic, expansive sense of time allows us to enter into his movies, to savor them. His great gift to moviegoers has been to allow us to live in the cinematic moment of his films as we are watching them and to send us back out into the world with a heightened awareness of the lyricism that can exist in seemingly quotidian moments: what it feels like to walk in a park taking in the surroundings, to stop into a bar for a drink, to sink back into the comfort of your apartment at the end of a work day. Rivette makes life seem like a gift.

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