"Va Savoir"

"Va Savoir" is at its best when it's revealing the quirks or follies or even small nobilities of these characters. The plot is punctuated by scenes from the Pirandello theater production. If the play's connections to the action are teasing and elusive, Rivette suggests his own connections between life and the theater. Camille, who at first appears to be nothing more than the mixture of self-absorption and fragility that can make actors seem like such pills, talks to herself when she's alone like a stage character conducting a monologue -- of course, she is a character and those of us in the theater are her audience. And Pierre, with habits so predictable Camille can locate him easily after an absence of three years, is like an actor settled into the routine of a long run.

The movie is at its most enjoyable, though, when the characters go off the dutifully followed script of their lives. The conventional-seeming Sonia drops hints of an unsavory and dangerous past, and a capacity for cunning that belies her veneer. Camille really comes alive as a character when she moves past her self-absorption to forge a spiky bond with Sonia (a relationship that carries echoes of the partnership/friendship at the heart of "Celine and Julie"). Balibar is in a tricky situation here. A wonderful actress, she plays Camille so convincingly that she may be in danger of having audiences react to her as if she's annoying rather than an actress playing an annoying character. Balibar knows how to use her long, slim body eloquently, shoving her hands in her pockets or shrugging her shoulders to regain composure after a moment of inadvertent emotional exposure. And when her wide, clown's grin splits her face she seems a natural clown, as if Harpo Marx had momentarily taken up refuge in a chic young Frenchwoman.

The movie's best scenes are those betweeen Sergio Castellitto's Ugo and Hélenè de Fougerolles' Do. (Castellitto and de Fougerolles also give the movie's best performances.) Ugo suggests the friendliest kind of obsessive, more offhanded than ardent, and Castellitto's droopy eyes are what give him both his charm and his slight air of sadness. You understand immediately why Do is attracted to Ugo, and de Fougerolles with her sandy blond hair and doe eyes that peer out of a head held cocked to the side is so ravishing, so sensually indolent that she makes Ugo even more appealing: You understand just how much of a gent this guy is for not cheating on Camille. The most heated sexual moment in the movie is when Ugo massages Do's foot while explaining why he won't sleep with her. And there's a great moment when the air between them crackles with the longing for a kiss and Ugo leans into her lips and then, faithful to Camille, instead plants a gentle peck on the tip of Do's nose.

These scenes are also the most Rivettian, focused as they are on the search for the Goldoni manuscript in an old library, Rivette's traditional house of mystery. We become so immersed in the search for the manuscript, in the joy of tracking something down, that the question of whether Ugo and Do will be successful is beside the point. And that's why the scenes point up exactly what's lacking in the rest of the movie. A colleague of mine who admires "Va Savoir" called it "a Rivette movie for people who don't like Rivette movies" and he's more right than I want to admit. Although the director applied his usual methods, working with the actors to fit their characters into a story that he worked out as he went along, the film feels much more orchestrated than Rivette's usual films. And as such, it doesn't quite breathe, doesn't have the sense of expansiveness that characterizes his best work.

"Va Savoir" is never less than witty, charming, accomplished. And the end, which brings the characters together to the gently melancholy strains of Peggy Lee's "Senza Fina," is a marvel, a resolution (of sorts) pulled from the movie's tangled narrative and emotional threads. In the last shot Rivette pulls back to show us his characters gathered on a stage. It's the perfect capper, and taking in Rivette's elegantly choreographed finale is immensely pleasing. And yet the overlord's eye view of that final shot feels all wrong, or at least an indication of the movie's misplaced priorities -- a way of focusing on technique when we long to be among the characters in the confusion and pleasure of an emotional dance that has, for the moment, rectified itself.

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