The romantic comedy Va Savoir (Who Knows?) is a trifle by the great French master Jacques Rivette — a statement which means that this movie is nevertheless head and shoulders above most of the current offerings out there, and certainly at the top of the standard romantic comedy heap. A roundelay among six characters in Paris, Va Savoir is temperamentally Gallic and takes its full two and a half hour running time to show its whole hand and deliver its seductive payoffs. The length will be nothing new to Rivette fanciers, who will note that this new film still clocks in with a much shorter running time than such masterpieces of his as Celine and Julie Go Boating and La Belle Noiseuse. Rivette was one of the original Cahiers du cinema film critics and the first to complete a movie in the Fifties. Va Savoir, made at the age of 73, is rife with Rivette’s recurring themes: the contrasts and similarities between artifice and reality, the theatre as a paradigm for expressing these tensions, the emphasis on the bonding of female characters, and the idea of the search being more important and satisfying than the discovery. The story centers on the lives of Camille (Balibar), an actress who is starring in a traveling production of a Pirandello play performed by a struggling Italian theatre troupe, which is managed and directed by her lover and co-star Ugo (Castellitto). While in Paris, Camille decides to confront her past and look up her old boyfriend Pierre (Bonaffé), a pretentious academic who is now married to a ballet teacher with a dark past named Sonia (Basler). Ugo, meanwhile, decides to track down a long-lost manuscript he believes to be an unpublished play by the 18th-century playwright Goldoni. His search leads him to Do (De Fougerolles), a beautiful young student who helps him in the library and would also like to do so in bed. Do’s half-brother Arthur is coincidentally carrying on an affair with Sonia. The plot developments hinge on these six characters, who come together in a variety of ways but never reveal all until the very end. Typical of Rivette, the story’s invention and fascination all lies in the “getting there” rather than the arrival. The film starts a bit slowly as the focus dwells too long on the indecision of Camille, and we fear that the story may belong to her alone. But, gradually, Va Savoir stirs the pot and we begin to discover its generous embrace of the many instead of the few. The movie is perhaps less ambitious than some of Rivette’s other films, but its warm humor and love for its characters ultimately wins us over to its side.
This article appears in November 16 • 2001.
