Mr. Sleeman Is Coming

     Who Knows?

     Jacques Rivette's films borrow from theatrical methods of presentation, yet also employ purely cinematic space and time.  Dialogue, far in excess of what one gets in a typical Hollywood film, dominates the scenes, as do depictions of characters going about their own often mysterious activities.  The mystery comes from Rivette's withholding of interior information, from the revealing of actions without our necessarily knowing what lies behind the actions.  You never know what's going to happen next in a Rivette film.  Comparisons to the films of David Lynch have been made by critics partly because of these tendencies of Rivette's.  We don't know why Diane Ladd smears red lipstick all over her face in Lynch's Wild At Heart, but the action indicates something deeply troubled inside the character.

     Similarly, Rivette shows the combination of exterior and interior in the actions of his characters in one of his typically mysterious and whimsical films, Va savoir from 2001.  The premise of the performance of an Italian play put on in Paris is enhanced in a distancing effect by making it a Pirandello play, Come tu mi vuoi, meaning As You Want Me, a play performed in Italian for French audiences in the film.  In Rivette's nearly thirteen hour long masterpiece, Out 1, two separate groups rehearse a pair of plays by Aeschylus.  Rivette said he picked that ancient playwright's Seven Against Thebes and Prometheus Bound because of their obscurity to modern audiences.  This is in keeping with his tendency to find the things that are off to the side of our awareness most interesting.  

     Much of Va savior deals with Camille (Jeanne Balibar) and her difficulties with acting as the lead in the Pirandello play, as well as her shaky at times relationship with the dynamic Italian theater director and leading man on the stage, Ugo (Sergio Castellitto).  Camille reacquaints herself with her ex, a Heidegger scholar working on a thesis of narrow focus.  He's the intellectual type who gets carried away in talking about his brainy enthusiasms to the point of causing others to look down at their dinner plates.

     Ugo, meanwhile, has his own obsession: tracking down the truth behind a reference to a lost play by the eighteenth century playwright Goldoni.  He gets access to the papers of a dead scholar.  The scholar's great-granddaughter helps him look for the unpublished manuscript in a room filled with dust and papers, ledgers and oddments, some of which disappear now and then when the young woman's gambler brother takes a book to convert it into cash at the rare book shop.

     Like every Rivette film I've seen, Va savoir is strange, filled with odd little asides and pursuits, imbued with a sense of mystery that isn't really unsettling so much as intriguing.  As I watched it I realized that my favorite thing about Rivette's films is his use of outdoor space.  You feel and hear the trees, birds, water, traffic, footsteps, in a way not often experienced in films in which a car door closing becomes a sound effect instead of just the sound of a car door closing.  His outside world (and his interiors too) has an immediate realness that reflects soundly on the rest of his plots and character stories, making the sometimes fantastic elements of his films reachable to the part of our imaginations that will accept Dorothy's journey through Oz as long as she behaves like a somewhat naive teenaged girl uprooted from her familiar environment.

     Rivette's films tend to be long and slow, confusing, mesmerizing, beautiful, impactful, replete with moments of incomparable power, and above all, they're mysterious and well deserving of one's patience, as all worthwhile things in life tend to be.

                                                                            Vic Neptune