Va savoir (aka Who Knows?) (2001) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

When I saw the name of the director on this film, I thought it must be the son of the one I am familiar with. I thought that the original Jacques Rivette must have been dead for years. He was one of the leaders of the Nouvelle Vague movement in French cinema immediately after the World War, and he made his first film in the forties, his first feature-length film in the 50's.  I am an old fart, and he was making movies before I was born. Godard, Chabrol and Truffaut considered him a role model. He, like many of his contemporaries or near-contemporaries was a "Cahiers du Cinema" scholar turned director.

Unlike his contemporaries, he never really found fame or commercial success. He trod on the sidelines, never becoming part of the system, always maintaining kind of an "underground" consciousness in his filmmaking. He made such works as a 13 hour film, and a four hour film about paint drying, and he adapted opaque literary works by Diderot, Balzac and other philosophical or highbrow authors.

He's probably most famous to debauchees like us for his movie La Belle Noiseuse, which could just as easily be called "Four Hours of Emmanuelle Beart Posing Naked in Very Good Light While Paint Dries", which is not my kind of movie, but I like looking at the images from it.

He isn't dead. He is still at it, and his films are actually becoming more accessible.

Va savoir (aka Who Knows?) is his latest film, made 52 years after his first one.  It follows perfectly the Scoopy Phenomenon, an inexplicable mystery of French Films, which is that although only about 1 person out of a million in the real world is a philosophy teacher, about one character out of ten in French films is a philosophy teacher. This is not really a joke, but merely a slight exaggeration. The Scoopy Phenomenon apparently occurs because the French think, and therefore are.

In this case, they lead us to believe that it is a movie about actors, and that they are performing a play in Paris. As in a Pirandello play, it turns out that the whole thing is one level deeper than we think. It is actually a movie about actors playing the part of actors who are in Paris performing a play. Therefore, the play within a play turns out to be a play within a play within a play. And, to confuse matters even more, the play within a play within a play is a Pirandello play, so the whole construct is like one of those infinite mirror sequences, or one of those Russian nested dolls.

I don't know about y'all, but I hate that kind of contrived shit, so I was predisposed to hate this. I also don't like the types of plays where people obsess about concocted literary and romantic problems rather than genuine substantial matters. Hey, if you lost your boyfriend, find a new one, toots, and stop moping around like Brian Dennehy arriving too late for the early bird buffet. So the film had two strikes right there. It is also two and a half hours long, and in French, so I simply can't recommend it to any one unless it is specifically the type of film you like - talky, philosophical, neurotic, unresolved.

On the other hand, if you like witty, precise dialogue, and enjoy the literary tradition of good talk about relationships, the illusion of the theater, the meaning of life, and the nature of reality, this is a well constructed, well photographed film about intelligent people. Even though it had so many elements predisposing me to dislike it, I did like a lot of it in spite of myself.  

It is a good film, well received by almost every critic, but with a very limited target audience.