PARIS BELONGS TO US (1961)

Paris, 1957. College student Anne is taken to a bohemian cocktail party by her brother Pierre where people are talking about the death of Juan, a Spanish musician, judged to be a suicide but thought by some to have been murder. Anne becomes entangled with Pierre's friends: Gerard, an amateur theatre director who is trying to stage an avant-garde production of Shakespeare's Pericles; Philip, an intellectual forced to leave America because of McCarthyism; Terry, a woman who was Juan's lover but is now with Philip (and who has her sights set on Gerard); Jean-Marc, an old acquaintance of Anne's who has a part in Pericles. As an outsider, Anne seems more tolerated than accepted, but when an actress fails to show up for a rehearsal, Gerard gets Anne to take her place. The rehearsals, which are scattershot both in how much gets done and where they get done (a different space every day), become important enough to Anne that she skips her exams for the acting job; also important is her growing attraction to Gerard, who seems open to sleeping with any number of actresses. Meanwhile, the friends get sucked into Philip's theory that a shadowy fascist conspiracy murdered Juan for political reasons and may be after others in their group. Gerard wants a tape of guitar music that Juan made shortly before his death that he thinks would be good score material for his play, but the tape has vanished. Anne, trying to ingratiate herself with the flirtatious but noncommittal Gerard, turns detective to find the tape. Eventually, the play is picked up by a commercial producer who wants to change almost everything that Gerard has done. Gerard has to fire Anne (though she remains as an understudy) and soon, Gerard and much of the cast quit because of the conflicts with the producer, leading to the conspiracy theory becoming the focus of the characters.

This Jacques Rivette film, though shot in 1958 and thereby one of the earliest of the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) films, wasn't released until late 1961 due to post-production and financing problems, so it was late to the party, coming after influential films by Godard and Truffaut. The movie was generally overlooked at the time as not experimental enough for the Nouvelle Vague audience but not narratively traditional enough for a popular audience. At 140 minutes, this is awfully long and I admit that a more interesting visual style might have drawn me in more quickly. It seems to go through several stages: in the beginning, it feels like a character study of somewhat unmoored and unsatisfied people; then the production of the play takes center stage, so to speak, along with the slowly developing relationship between Anne and Gerard. The last third has something of a film noir feel, especially with the MacGuffin of Juan's tape, and we begin to think that the paranoiac beliefs of Philip and Terry might not be delusional. The film ends as an existential thriller (minus traditional crime movie thrills, though not without another death or two). The ending leaves us mostly satisfied while still mired in ambiguity. The discussions of fascism are uncomfortably relevant in the current political situation—the conspiracy is referred to as a "dictatorship syndicate" in which "all will be sacrificed to efficiency, the state, and technology." For much of the film, I thought the whole thing was going to be a kind of intellectual game played among bored bohemians (and I think that could have worked). The actors were not familiar to me but all were fine, especially Betty Schneider as Anne, Giani Esposito as Gerard (pictured), the most interesting character as, for a while at least, he seems the most grounded, and Daniel Crohem as Philip. I found the focus on Paris (lots of location shooting) to be a bit vague so the title is lost on me. (An opening title quotes poet Charles Peguy: "Paris belongs to no one.") Some critics suggest watching this film twice to get the most out of it, and I liked this enough to not be opposed to a re-viewing in the future. [Criterion Channel]