Va Savoir

A few years ago I spent a few weeks watching as many films from the French New Wave that I could my hands on. None of them, though, were by Jacques Rivette, one of the key members of the movement. His films, apparently, were quite experimental and challenging in nature (one of them was thirteen hours long).

So the first Rivette film I've seen is Va Savoir, which is from 2001, and it's quite ordinary in structure. It has a few subtle jump cuts, but all in all it's an orderly romance that bears a lot of similarities to the films of Woody Allen--a bunch of arty types form attachments and exchange droll quips. It's not as funny as Allen's films, but it has a nice heart.

The two main characters are a French actress who has left Paris to join a company in Italy, and she has married the director. They return to Paris in a tour of a Pirandello play, and she is unable to resist looking up her old lover, a philosophy professor. Lines of dialogue allude to the fact that when she left he was devastated. But he's taken up with a woman with a checkered past who has settled into domesticity and teaches ballet to little girls.

The Italian director (lovely played by Sergio Castelitto) uses his free time to research in libraries for a missing play by the Italian playwright Goldoni. He meets a beautiful young scholar and she is intrigued by his quest. Of course an attachment forms. Meanwhile, the actress has actually become friends with her old lover's new girlfriend. Add to the mix the young scholar's scoundrel brother, who is seducing the ballet teacher so he can steal her valuable diamond ring...

The film starts slowly, as it takes a while to get to know the characters and their connections to each other, as it is a European film and doesn't tell you everything right away. If you can stick with it, it brings its own rewards, and you learn things along the way, which is more satisfying that boring stretches of exposition. As I stated, the humor is droll, with no particularly laugh out loud sequences, but several that are amusing, especially when the Italian director challenges his wife's ex-lover to a duel, which turns out to be drinking vodka on a catwalk well above the theater's stage.

As a side-note, I must say that the actress who plays the young scholar, Hélène de Fougerolles, is one of the more beautiful women I've seen in films in quite a while.