DVD Va Savoir

A smart comic gem

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.

At last! The best movie of 2001.

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.