by Allan Fish
Note: This review by Allan Fish considers a seminal work of the late Jacques Rivette. Though it was previously published, it reappears to pay homage to the great director, and will be followed by a few others in the coming weeks.
(France 1961 140m) DVD2
Aka. Paris Belongs to Us
The star Absinthe approaches earth
p Roland Nonia d Jacques Rivette w Jacques Rivette, Jean Gruault ph Charles Bitsch ed Denise de Casablanca m Philippe Arthuys
Betty Schneider (Anne Goupil), Gianni Esposito (Gerard Lenz), Françoise Prévost (Terry Yordan), Daniel Crohem (Philip Kaufman), François Maistre (Pierre Goupil), Jean-Claude Brialy (Jean-Marc), Jean-Marie Rohain (De Georges), Jean-Luc Godard, Brigitte Juslin, Jacques Demy,
It was only a few weeks ago. The 11th Doctor crash-landed on earth, David Tennant had finally turned into Matt Smith. The latter had promised a little girl he’d be back in five minutes but it turns out to be twelve years. He comes back only to bashed over the head with a cricket bat, handcuffed to a radiator and come round to find the first thing he sees is Amy Pond’s endless legs. She doubts his existence; four psychiatrists in twelve years have told her he can’t exist. Then he asks her a question. “On this floor, how many rooms?” She’s incredulous but finally responds “five.” After all, she should know; she’s lived there for over a decade. The Doctor replies “six”, Amy is even more incredulous, and then the Doctor tells her to look where she’s never wanted to look, in the corner of her eye. There, slowly looking back over her shoulder, she sees it. “How is that possible?” she protests. “Perception filter”, the Doctor says, of an entire room she never knew existed.
Take us then back half a century. Jacques Rivette had been begging, cadging, borrowing Claude Chabrol’s camera to try and make his debut film. It took him several years. It’s set in 1957 because that’s when he began the project. Yet what resulted would be, to many of the intelligentsia, the same feeling that the delectable redhead with the lilting Inverness burr would feel. A new room, a new world. Brave new world. A world where nothing is what it seems and everything is a potential birthplace for paranoia. More still, it predicted the decade that would follow, the decade of student uprising, of revolution and of political assassinations, secret coup d’états performed with such ruthless efficiency that the details are still hazy enough to keep Oliver Stone guessing.
Take a student, Anne, who is drifting from one exam to another and feeling rather bored one August in Paris. She is taken to an intellectual gathering by her brother, Pierre, and there sees American political refugee Philip mouth off while drunk. She thinks little of it until she sees him again the following day and Philip perhaps unwisely tells her of his paranoia, of how a new world order is controlling things behind the scenes, a fantasy that might seem as fanciful as those Zion conspiracies the Nazis used to justify genocide, were it not for the fact that there was a mysterious death to account for. Juan, a Spanish musician and refugee, has supposedly committed suicide. His friends are strangely reluctant to talk about his death. Gerard, a young producer who’s preparing to stage Shakespeare’s Pericles, is more concerned about a lost tape of guitar music that Juan composed for his play days before his death. Anne, slowly falling in love with Gerard, accepts a part in his play and takes it upon herself to search for the tape.
“I speak in riddles, but some things can only be told in riddles” Philip tells Anne, and it’s certainly true of Rivette’s film. It’s fractured and somewhat disjointed as one might expect from a film with the most stop-start production since Welles’ Othello. In some ways, though, that’s exactly what the story, or rather the mood, requires. Everything is kept out of reach, with the Babel clip from Lang’s Metropolis there as if to emphasise the point. A thunderstorm breaks out over a tetchy rehearsal, a walk-out seems to bring the production to a halt, much like in his later L’Amour Fou, and the merits of plays themselves are dismissed as the “pastimes of intellectuals.” Yet there’s the paradox, for what else is the search for impossible conspiracies, dizzying leaps into the vortex of the mind. The conspiracy itself isn’t what matters; “you don’t have to believe, just pretending will do.” Remember those words, for they’re essential to comprehending Rivette’s entire career.
