Va Savoir – 2001, Jacques Rivette

 

by Allan Fish

(France 2001 154m) DVD1/2

Aka. Who Knows?

Tempus fugit, manet amor

p  Martine Marignac  d  Jacques Rivette  w  Christine Laurent, Jacques Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer  ph  William Lubtchansky  ed  Nicole Lubtchansky  art  Manu de Chauvigny

Jeanne Balibar (Camille), Sergio Castellito (Ugo), Jacques Bonnaffe (Pierre), Marianne Basler (Sonia), Hélène de Fougerolles (Dominique Desprez), Bruno Todeschini (Arthur Desprez), Catherine Rouvel (mother), Claude Berri (book antiquarian),

Take six people, three men, three women.  Take a Pirandello play, ‘As You Desire Me’, and take that play as the starting point for a plot in which the six characters act as if in said Pirandello play.  Take a director, past seventy now, returning if not quite to his roots than at least to the tree that flowered from them, to memories of Paris nous appartient and L’Amour Fou.  To be fair, he’d returned several times in the interim, but Va Savoir shares a theatrical sense that those earlier two milestones had.

            Here we take Camille, a French actress who is returning to Paris for the first time in three years to appear in an original Italian language production of Pirandello’s play put on by her director lover, Ugo.  On her return to Paris she has a yen to see if her one-time lover Pierre still visited his daily park bench to read his newspaper, which he does.  They meet, she says her goodbyes.  Ugo meanwhile is a man on a mission, to find a missing unpublished play by Goldoni, ‘Il Destino Veneziano’, which leads him to the house of a family who have a private library full of rare treasures, and to the daughter of the family, Dominique, who he had previously met in a library.  Dominique is researching fastening devices on Roman garments in Italian and American films of the sword and sandal era, and has a half-brother, Arthur, who is a gambler now reduced to thieving his way to funds, either in the form of petty larceny from the family library or valuable rings, the latest of which belongs to Sonia, the wife of Pierre, Camille’s ex-. 

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