Go figure!
Jacques Rivette turns 73-years-young with Va Savoir
François Truffaut’s famous assertion that the French New Wave of the 1960s started "thanks to Rivette" hasn't necessarily prevented Jacques Rivette’s films from being stuck in the shadows of his contemporaries.
With Va Savoir, Rivette proves that he is still a genuine master worthy of the world’s attention.
Camille (Jeanne Balibar) and Ugo (Sergio Castellitto) are in Paris as part of a travelling theatre troupe’s money-losing presentation of Luigi Pirandello's stage play "As You Desire Me." For Camille, something – altogether intangible and without words – is missing.
At each turn of Camille and Ugo’s wrinkling relationship, Rivette tosses in another character somehow attached to all the others through what essentially becomes a charming game of Six Degrees of Parisian Separation. To make a long story short, Camille checks in on her ex-lover Pierre (Jacques Bonnaffé), now living with Sonia (Marianne Basler), the objection of affection for Arthur (Bruno Todeschini), half-brother of the aspiring scholar Dominique (Hélène de Fougerolles), who soon comes to assist Ugo in his long search for a lost play by his theatrical hero, Goldoni.
To make the film work, one must accept the coincidental way in which Rivette sprinkles in his characters one by one – while the film’s title accurately translates to "Who knows?" it may as well be "Why not?" The biggest leap of faith may come in the happy discovery of Dominique’s family library – if Goldoni’s play exists anywhere, it exists there. In the way it plays with character conveniences and the construction of its own mini-world of characters – there often doesn’t appear to be anyone else living in Rivette’s Paris – Va Savoir works as an adult version of The Royal Tenenbaums’ re-imagined New York, stripped of its pastel backgrounds and spotted-mice sight gags.
Va Savoir is first and foremost a charming, intellectual, bourgeois, drawing-room comedy – the characters argue over long-forgotten philosophers during dinner parties, and two of the film’s best jokes involve the titles of Pierre and Dominique’s thesis dissertations. Much like Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (which saved its murder mystery for the film’s final act and all but shrugged it off in favour of its upstairs-downstairs class struggle), Va Savoir tosses in a last-minute jewel heist and a hilarious attempted duel-to-the-death that may sound awkward on paper but works beautifully in balancing Rivette’s dual strains of comedy and eloquent romance.
Behind the camera, Rivette operates much like his compatriot Eric Rohmer (who is also discovering a resurgence of interest thanks to his recent The Lady and the Duke). Takes are long and talky, with the occasional expert jump-cut (a remnant from Rivette’s days in the Nouvelle Vague) sending characters leaping across the room. Visually, Rivette’s camera is far less interested in what’s happening than it is in how the characters talk about it, and here just as much is said with a shrug as a lengthy monologue.
Running parallel with the stage play within it, the film comes to a head on the theatre stage itself before the final show’s curtain call in a sequence that borders on intellectual slapstick. While Rivette’s sense of romance ensures all's well that ends well for all concerned, there’s still the sense of outside possibilities – once again, who knows? Camille and Ugo may seem to exit up the stage set’s staircase perfectly (back) in love, but Rivette knows things are never entirely certain in the ways of the heart – even after the final curtain falls. |
