Va savoir

Plot synopsis:
After three years away, the actress Camille returns to Paris in an Italian troupe run by her lover Ugo, who is touring Europe with an Italian-language production of a minor Pirandello play. Camille is nervous because she still has feelings over leaving her lover Pierre, who she tracks down in a park. He seems unchanged and has still not finished writing his doctoral thesis on Martin Heidegger.
Ugo meanwhile is pursuing his private search for a lost play by Goldoni and in a library meets the attractive Dominique, who tells him to try a collector. The collector sends him to the private library inherited by Dominique's mother, who warns him that books have disappeared. She is happy for him to browse and Dominique helps him. When she takes him to her bedroom, however, her jealous half-brother Arthur intervenes (it is later revealed that he is her secret lover). Dominique warns Ugo that it is Arthur who steals books to sell.
Pierre asks Camille and Ugo to dinner at his flat with his lover Sonia, which proves a disaster as the nervous Camille drinks too much and the jealous Ugo mocks Pierre. When Camille goes round next day to apologise to Sonia, the two women begin to form a rapport. However Sonia is being pursued by Arthur and in a bar Camille sees him trying to embrace her. In fact he is taking an impression of her very valuable diamond ring, which he later replaces with a worthless duplicate.
In despair at this deceit, Sonia asks Camille if she will help. She goes round to Arthur's flat and offers him a simple deal: she will either spend the night with him or walk out on the spot. He opts for the night and, once he is asleep, she searches until she finds the ring in the kitchen. Now able to be friends with Sonia, Camille is still worried that she has not closed things with Pierre. When she goes to see him, he locks her in a room and she escapes by a skylight. Ugo then calls on Pierre and challenges him to a duel, place and weapons to be his choice. When Pierre accepts, he finds that the place is over the flies in the theatre and the weapons are a bottle of vodka each. As Pierre is the first to fall over, Ugo wins.
In the meantime Dominique has found the Goldoni play, not in the library but in the kitchen among her mother's cookbooks. When she brings it to Ugo, roaring drunk after his duel, he says it is so valuable that she must keep it and just give him a photocopy. Camille turns up with the ring and offers it back to Sonia, who says Camille has earned it and must keep it. Reunited and now rich, Camille and Ugo look forward to the next stop on their tour.

Tags: absurd, intrigue, romantic

Review:
Having read many of the comments of "Va Savoir" here, (admittedly mostly from the other side of the Atlantic), I was surprised by the amount of hostility towards this film.Whilst I admit that it may have benefited from a little judicious editing, perhaps down to around two hours, this seems to me to be a well acted and entertaining slice of french life.
Initially, I found her portrayal cold and unemotional, but this I believe was intentional and as the film progresses, she is revealed as a complicated and enigmatic character, capable of intense emotions but also of granting sexual favours just to create a diversion.There is also a fine performance from Sergio Castellitto as Ugo, entirely convincing, except perhaps in his refusal to bed the truly delicious "Do" played by a ravishing Hélène de Fougerolles, (surely another French actress destined for greatness).
Indeed, Jacques Rivette seems to have nurtured excellent performances all round.Whilst this is not a perfect film, it offers more than enough to warrant a few short hours of your time.
The film's heroine, Camille, a French stage actress left Paris three years ago and found success in Torino, Italy where she became a lead actress for the theater company.
She returns back to Paris with Ugo and his company to act in Italian as a main character in Pirandello's "As You Desire Me", the play that explores the mysteries of identity and memory.
I found Camille's character (as played by Jeanne Balibar, the stage actress and a dancer) very interesting.
She may not be likable in a beginning but she is talented and every character in the movie after watching her performing at the stage leaves with the feelings that they've witnessed something very special.
Ugo tries to find in the Paris libraries the lost but existing play by the Italian dramatist of 18th century, Carlo Goldoni and is helped by an intelligent and beautiful young student, Dominique or Do and they both seem to have developed some special feelings for each other.
Of course I've not seen that many French romantic comedies, but I can state that were this in the hands of an American 'Hollywood' director it would be an entirely different film.
Some years ago Sophie Marceau explained her move to Hollywood in more or less the following terms: I am tired of doing the same French movies where all in all there is a love triangle and in the end the three of them have dinner together.
Except for the brother-and-sister duo who are kind of stereotypical and possibly present the spectator with the cliché of male and female libertine Parisians, the other two couples arouse our curiosity with their insufficiencies: Camille is a little too absent-minded to be completely sane, Pierre is a typical academic dork who falls into furies of sophisticated frustration, Ugo visibly carries the burden of his unattractive appearance and compensates for it with his thick Italian accent, while Sonia obstinately tries to keep to the level of those intellectual pricks and prove how much more she knows about real life.
Throughout the film, there is a huge amount of feeling going back and forth, but we all (together with the director, the movie cast and the crew) watch it all happen as if it's not even happening.
In this sense, this movie is either very successful and it gave me the exact feeling, or maybe I am overly empathetic : )It did take me 3 days to watch, with numerous interruptions of daily life, and I even stopped watching now and started writing this review.Yes, I do not know the ending yet.
The story revolves around a French actress in the troupe who is married to the director of the theatre group who is returning to Paris for the first time in years and still has unresolved feelings for an ex who resides in the city.
Having said this I could not help but feel the whole thing was somewhat slight and the payoff in time (it is or seemed like a very long movie) was somewhat unjustified.
In some ways the characters seemed almost distant to me, they were real but I couldnt get inside their head, which in some ways is a silly criticism because life is like that and that is not necessarily a detraction for the film but I felt as though they were drifting through a series of set pieces with not all that much at stake.
While in Paris in a tour of the Italian play "Como Tu Mi Vuoi", the lead actress Camille (Jeanne Balibar), who is living with the director Ugo Bassani (Sergio Castellitto), recalls and misses her former love Pierre (Jacques Bonnaffé).
Meanwhile, Do's smalltime crook stepbrother Arthur (Bruno Todeschini) seduces Sonia to steal her expensive ring.I saw "Va Savoir" with great expectation, but I was quite disappointed with this pointless film.
Still, thelegendary Jacques Rivette is known for his l*o*n*g running times;he probably considers this 2 1/2 hour film to be a short.
Other than that he's OK.)My suggestion--don't go to this film expecting "Rules of the Game," but see it because it is French, it is directed by Jacques Rivette,and it gives ample screen time to three excellent female actors..
It's a cerebral movie, as are most of the best French films going back about 80 years or so.
From the opening scene (where the subtitles were not working on my DVD) all the way till the final moments of the film, we have to follow four of the dullest characters in cinematic history.
We, the audience, were forced to follow a lot of assumptions in this film, and whenever we felt that we fully understood and connected with a character, Rivette would pull us further away.
I had trouble understanding the play that was happening throughout the film, thus causing me to care less about the characters.
A light Rivette; Va Savoir (2001) is a film that features many of the director's most recognisable traits and characteristics familiar from the unwieldy and progressive films that he made in the late 1960's and early 1970's, but done in such a way as to suggest a more frivolous or throwaway tone with the emphasis placed more squarely on the elements of comedy and farce.
This doesn't necessarily mean that the film is bad, or that it fails in some way to compare to the more iconic likes of Paris nous appartient (1960), L'amour fou (1969), Out 1 (1971) and Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) - all of which are referenced here - but rather, that it shows a process of simplification; with Rivette taking his chosen themes - such as performance, miscommunication and the battle of the sexes - and allowing the characters to take precedence over the story, as opposed to the experiments with the film-making form.
Along the way we have the usual self-reflexive comments on the nature of performance and of film-making itself, with the story revolving around an Italian-language production of Luigi Pirandello's "As You Desire Me" that the central couple are appearing in.
As with those particular films, Va Savoir offers a narrative in which the subtle juxtaposition of the characters thoughts, feelings and social interactions creates a comedy of errors to undercut many of the more dramatic or self-consciously self-reflexive elements of the film.As ever with Rivette - or at least the work of his that I've so far seen - the film moves perfectly between the various characters and their roles and interactions, as the skillful sense of choreography between the different layers of the narrative and the impeccable comic-performances of the cast help to draw us in to the story and lead us towards that quietly brilliant final act.
I can certainly understand why many would dislike the film; it's long, deals exclusively in character interaction (on at least two separate levels) and creates a world that is stuffy and intellectual, no doubt seemingly horribly pretentious to those unwilling to spend more than thirty minutes with these characters or the world that Rivette creates.
Regardless, I personally think that Va Savoir is a fine film; both intelligent and entertaining and with that spark and spirit so recognisable in the director's work from Paris nous appartient to the celebrated Celine and Julie..
Ten years later, Rivette is even more riveting with an astonishing screenplay working again with long-time collaborating writing team of Pascal Bonitzer & Christine Laurent.Va savoir (2001) - aka Who Knows?
However, as we advance in the story and see the main character quirkiness, hopes, fears and dreams and feel the tension of their past, present and future love interests intertwine we enter an alluring drama way beyond conventional clichés of performing art in cinema.A lot of details are in the screenplay with funny twists and turns, discomfort, joy, questioning and dismay.
Aronofsky' Black Swan (2010) also come to mind but for dance.Va savoir (2001) has so many interesting elements with side stories of a life that lead to prison or the central search for a unpublished and never performed play.
There are many sexual and emotional tension building between the strong central and secondary characters over the course of two and a half hours and an unexpected funny and fitting finale.Rivette's choices make the situations intense and bring the viewer into an in intellectual, emotional and physical experience of high calibre that is not quite like any other.
The only time I felt anything for one of the characters here was near the beginning, when Camille, the lead actor in a Parisian production of a Pirandello play, a French woman speaking in Italian, has trouble remembering her lines (she is pre-occupied by a past love affair which had taken place in that city).
There are some nice moments, especially when Ugo fends off temptation from the lovely Dominique, and the duel scene between Ugo and the prat of a philosopher who was once his partner Camille's lover, but the whole thing takes far too long (2 hours 20 minutes), lacks tension and above all calls for minimal involvement on the part of the viewer.
"Va Savoir (Who knows?)" is for Eric Rohmer fans, though it's even slower and with less humor than Rohmer's intellectually romantic talk fests.Director Pierre Rivette is a contemporary of Rohmer's whose penchant for long, slow films has hampered his success in the U.S. And I guess this is his most accessible film, as the last half-hour suddenly becomes sweeter and filled with coincidences so the interplays of three couples become intertwined almost in a drawing-room comedy.But first are all kinds of references that went way over my head as I hadn't realized until late in the movie that the play that we keep seeing long chunks being performed in Italian by one of the couples is a Pirandello piece, with the gimmick here that we sort of see it backwards, mostly from the last scene to the start, so I missed some points.
I think this is a typical French author movie (read: pleases only its author :) where part of the audience will walk out, part will stay totally annoyed, and some will love it thinking it's of the greatest insight, overall not generating much revenue.Plot: A small troupe of Franco-Italian actors present a new theater piece in Paris, with moderate success.
There are also unusually funny moments in the movie that provide for a breath of air since the film is not very fast paced and long.
The character of Camille during the first hour of the film seemed mentally disturbed--constantly talking to herself, so why am i to think that any man should find her attractive.
This film aside from being pointless was toooo long, i wanted to walk out on numerous occassions but feared, the moment i did would be when the movie suddenly made sense, so much for that.
If you don't have a great script that brings out great insights into the nature of your navel, don't write about your navel.Second, Rivette, who probably has lived off of government grants for much of his adult life, focuses on lead characters who can afford to stay in a luxurious hotel in Paris even though their play is failing and they're broke.
If there's supposed to be some thematic connection between the Pirandello production involving two of the film's characters, of which scenes are shown throughout, and the story in which they are contained, it escaped me...no, wait....The Pirandello play in question, "As You Desire Me," (as the title is usually rendered in English) may be connected.
Think Sheridan, Congreve, Marivaux--any 18th century farce where style is its own reward.I found Sergio Castellitto very funny and moving as Ugo; Jeanne Balibar continues to impress me as Camille (she was the only good thing in Desplechin's messy, overlong Ma vie sexuelle); Jacques Bonnaffe did a great job as the pedantic professor who can still rise to the challenge of a duel--the funniest duel I've ever seen, fought with vodka bottles up in the flies of the theater.Curtain..
You probably won't until the second hour of this typically lengthy and longueur-y Rivettean opus, which spins a very conventional Marivaux-meets-twentieth-century romantic minuet out of the unlikeliest of materials: scenes between emotionally battered lovers that suggest that Rivette, long esteemed as a conceptualist, really has the chops in his direction of actors to make explorations of the heart on a par with Pialat, Cassavetes and Bergman.The central performance of Jeanne Balibar, also, is endlessly fascinating: one cannot quite tell whether her self-regard is her own or her characters, whether her tics are hideously mannered or charming, whether she exerts a tidal attraction or a clammy, cold-palms repulsion.
In one sense it revolves around Camille (Jeanne Balibar) a French actress back on French soil for the first time in three years via a European tour of Pirandello's As You Desire Me. Camille is, in fact, the first thing we see as a pin-spot picks her out of the darkness reinforcing the theatrical quality we are in for.
Ostensibly an item with Ugo (Sergio Castellitto) the director of the play and leading actor opposite her, Camille has it in mind to look up her ex-lover, a Professor of Philosophy who, in the interim has married and become a devoted husband.
The only thing that really had me laughing was the ending when the vodka duel ensues, and the film ends up on stage like a play.
But the way that leads to that ending is a hard one, and has the problem with the main character which looks terribly unadjusted with all the other normal people around her.
I caught this film on HBO West on a snow day here on the US East Coast, and found that after the first half hour, I started understanding the French dialogue without the subtitles, because the actors kept repeating OVER AND OVER AND OVER!
Seeing that most Americans commenting on this film didn't like it, I suppose it's at least partly because the film does not really tell a story, well, not in a good straightforward way at least.
Also, being a theatrical production we watch being performed, it is played with a different intensity than the rest of the film.Camille and Ugo are lovers.
Ugo, who also acts in the play, is determined to find a rare Carlo Goldoni's play, "Il Destino Veneziano", which might have been written in Paris in the eighteenth century.A few days after the opening, Camille goes to a park where she knows she will find Pierre, a man whose habits take him to the same places all the time.
The last half hour makes more sense as all the different conflicts come to a head and the film becomes alive, especially the funny 'duel' between Ugo and Pierre at the theater.
Sergio Castellitto, one of the best Italian actors working in movies these days, is perfect as Ugo. He can be intense, vain, or playful, yet he doesn't stray from betraying Camille.
I did like all the actors especially Jeanne Balibar who is the central character but I would like them even more in a more interesting film and the main problem comes from the fact that the script doesn't really let viewers know who these characters really are and instead the focus is just on their immediate problems.
Jacques Rivette's "Va Savoir (Who Knows?)" is one such film, running at two-and-a-half hours, without any real purpose or entertainment value for the first two hours (!).
The acting is up to par with that in an American romantic comedy, and is edged slightly higher due to the flawless bilingual dialogue of leads such as Jeanne Balibar (Camille) and Sergio Castillitto (Ugo), who are involved in an Italian theatre production.
Fine performances in particular from the somewhat neurotic, insecure actress Camille (Jeanne Balboni) who reminded me of some of Diane Keaton's classic characters in her personality and also her put-upon-and-pressured-and- stressed-wants-to-do-the-right-thing-but-it's-not-easy director and co-star in their production, not to mention her boyfriend, Ugo (Sergio Castellito) who seems like a fundamentally good guy who is, as I mentioned, stressed out and totally in lust with Dominique (and who can blame him?) but seems to want to remain loyal to the flighty and confused Camille.
Rivette-characteristically for French films as against US films, at least generally speaking-allows us to have mixed feelings about characters.
But I also came to the realization that most people I have encountered DON'T know much of Heidegger's philosophy, haven't read more than "Six Characters" by Pirandello, and few seem to have seen even a single play by Goldoni.And few of the people who express enjoyment of the movie on this site seem to do so based upon the relationship of these authors' texts to what is happening on the screen.
So I rented it again.I now doubt that I missed much - and think the movie simply fails on all levels.Romantic comedies really need appealing characters - this has only one -played by the lovely Helene de Fouguerolles.