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BY
CHRIS FUJIWARA
A couple are at the center of Jacques Rivette’s latest
film, Va savoir ( " Who Knows? " ). Camille (Jeanne Balibar)
is a famous French actress who left France three years ago upon the end of a
relationship. Now involved with an Italian director, Ugo (Sergio Castellito),
she returns to Paris on the tour of his Italian-language production of
Pirandello’s As You Desire Me. She seeks out her ex, Pierre (Jacques
Bonnaffé), a philosophy professor now living with dance instructor Sonia
(Marianne Basler). Meanwhile, Ugo’s search for the manuscript of an
unpublished and possibly apocryphal Goldoni play brings him in contact with
an attractive young student, Dominique (Hélène de Fougerolles). What strikes you first about
this film is its openness, the sense that the story could go any way. It’s
the same feeling that was so intoxicating in Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go
Boating. This sense of freedom permeates the film, coming from Rivette’s
muted colors, his intimate light, his obsessive but wild play with stairways
and doorways, and from the way shots just seem to snap together (see what he
does with complementary two-shots of sundered couples at a failed dinner
party). Rivette has had two
periods. The first included some films that are still at the forefront of
avant-garde narrative cinema. That period began with 1960’s Paris Belongs
to Us, peaked with the 1969-1974 masterpieces L’amour fou, Out
1, and Céline and Julie, and petered out in the late ’70s, when
his career seemed to falter and most viewers lost track of him. The second
period began in 1991 with his re-emergence as the lucid, charming,
magisterial storyteller of La belle noiseuse. Those who have missed in
the second period the danger, the madness, and the experimentalism of the
first will rejoice in Va savoir. Here Rivette gathers his
quintessential themes and looks at them with light-hearted detachment while
pushing them to the limit. Those themes include theater, role playing,
switched partners, the mysteries of chance, the text as the object of a quest
and a template for experience, two women teaming to foil a crime, the loss
and recovery of magic objects. The film sums up not just Rivette’s career but
the whole glorious tradition of films about theater. Balibar’s dazzling
Camille has the strength and the spiritual hesitancy of Anna Magnani’s
Camilla, the actress heroine of Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach.
(Rivette pays further homage to Renoir by giving a key role to Catherine
Rouvel, from Renoir’s 1959 Picnic on the Grass, who has matured as
robustly as any admirer of her pagan teenage sex goddess in that film could
wish.) Rivette cuts repeatedly to Camille on stage, putting the camera in the
midst of the actors, keeping us on edge and uncertain. As Pirandello’s "
strange lady, " Camille is a mystery in motion, distant and sealed off
as if behind glass. She takes some of this mystery with her as we follow her
deeper and deeper into her real life. All the characters here
are on the brink of the abyss. As Sonia notices, Camille’s role in As You
Desire Me is " beautiful but dangerous. " Sonia herself is
about to embark on her own perilous experiment by encouraging the attentions
of a younger suitor, the nefarious Arthur (Bruno Todeschini). Meanwhile,
Camille flirts with re-entering what was obviously an obsessive relationship
with Pierre, and Ugo comes ever closer to succumbing to Dominique. In the words of Hölderlin
(which come here by way of Heidegger, by way of Pierre): " Where danger
is, there grows the saving power also. " The combination of danger and
saving is at the heart of Va savoir, close to everything the film has
to say about roles and identities. Rivette closes the film with the Peggy Lee
song " Senza Fine, " telling us not only that the show must and
does go on, but that there’s no less virtue in holding onto the past than in
letting go of it, and that there’s heroism in not capitulating to the
extinction of old loves. Since the film is a comedy, we’re in little doubt
that these too-self-aware but at the same time only semi-conscious characters
will find themselves — but how they find themselves is the
unpredictable, magical element of the film, and its final touch of grace. Issue
Date: October 11 - 18, 2001 (The Boston Phoenix) © 2001 Chris Fujiwara |
