SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot.
The innocuous title of Paris nous appartient suggests we are in for a New Wave fourteenth of July. In fact it uncovers a secret chamber, a mysterious, disquieting world of abrupt cuts, enigmatic faces and unfinished sentences, brusque fades and unanswered telephone calls. Everything, we feel, exists on a subliminal as well as a conscious level. This is one of the cinema’s nearest equivalents to Kafka. On the surface the images are crisp and disciplined, the sequences simple like the sentences in a Kafka novel. But these images are merely floating above a sea of doubts. It is five in the morning again, and Chaos may have come by six…
Even the story has parallels to, say, The Trial, as a quest by sober reason into quicksands of mystery which it can never hope to penetrate, a quicksand which finally traps its heroine and all but swallows her up. Anne Goupil (Betty Schneider) is a student living in Paris who becomes involved with a group of hard-up, hopeful young actors, staying in town for the summer to stage a production of Pericles. But the production seems doomed by the tensions within and around it, by dissonant relationships and the indifference of the professionals in the cast. This tension feeds constantly on the unexplained death of a Spaniard who had composed a production score, since all the circumstances which led up to Juan’s murder (or suicide) before the start of the film are now apparently repeating themselves for Gérard (Giani Esposito), the play’s producer. Anne’s growing love for Gérard impels her to investigate the mystery surrounding Juan’s death, and she sets out to find the missing clue – a tape-recording of his composition.
But her efforts are futile. Not only does she fail to prevent Gérard’s death, but her search involves her more and more deeply with a circle of bizarre, complex characters – Dark Powers behind the scene. Who are these Powers? A world-wide conspiracy awaiting the hour when they can seize power, an espionage network, or simply fantasy figures, creatures of the mind, liable at any moment to dissolve into the thin air of a sleepy summer Paris? We never find out. We remain to the end in a maze where both seeker and suspect are ‘tragic puppets’ – in Rivette’s own words – ‘sickened by the real world which they cannot reform.’ The world knows which way it goes, says one of these puppets, but it doesn’t let us know. Bearings are lost, danger is real, whatever its source. ‘An unknown horror threatens,’ rants the paranoid American novelist exiled by McCarthyism, ‘and nothing can be done.’ And the immeasurable proportions of this horror, the terrifying irony of unknown dimensions, 57 megatons packed into a single warhead, has never been put on to film in quite this way. Paris nous appartient is a story rooted in the despair of its own time, in which the music of the Apocalypse comes from a tape-recorder and the Dark Powers descend into Hades in the latest Thunderbird.
This is a difficult film in that it is open to innumerable meanings and works on many levels. Also it is full of influences. To me its key lies in a speech by the idealistic Gérard, whose staging of Pericles is an ingenuously ardent challenge to the machinations of the Dark Powers.
‘We are life,’ he tells Anne. ‘We are those who reach out after a fatal secret.’ And Rivette speaks up for this life of the everyday, which he respects and records with humour: for the cheerful young Finnish model; for the pensioner alone in his hotel room; for eager young actors putting on Shakespeare: each and every one of them in the face of danger. They too are innocent sorcerers, unable any longer to believe they can change their destiny. And yet, in Anne’s quest after the truth about Juan’s death, Rivette is hinting at that intuitive, unavoidable spirit of human inquiry for reason, knowledge, cause in the face of imminent tragedy. The show – life – must go on, even if it seems vulnerable and futile. And the fusion of these ideas lends a disturbing beauty to the final image, when the diminished little group begins rehearsals afresh at a lakeside in a deserted country park. Swans float up and down the still water, stirring it with their wings. A symbol of calm, sober beauty or of continuing menace – whatever you want to make of it. But certainly an image of power and poetic quality.
Rivette realises this manifold concept with a firm technical control. The narrative is at first sight loose, like that of Pericles, but as Gérard remarks, ‘it all ties up in another place.’ The plot walks with tightrope assurance that narrow line where mystification ends and the demands of the thriller form begin. Well-observed as individuals, the characters also contribute to Rivette’s picture of them as a microcosm of a world on the brink of disaster, with a dreamer, a seeker, victims, cheats and dupes. And in this context the figures themselves exist as enigmas – nowhere more compellingly than in the case of Françoise Prévost’s destructive schemer, Cocteau’s princess in a Sixties guise. Throughout, the complex interplay is managed with ease and skill.
Undeniably a rare film, one can still describe it perhaps in that less rare term of a revelation. For one thing, Jacques Rivette, unlike some of his more fashionable colleagues (Godard, Chabrol), has shown the courage it takes to remain disciplined. He gives us surface accuracy and trusts us to understand that there is far more behind what he shows. He has conscience and intellect; and he lives, breathes, understands our age of Fright Breaks and End-of-the-World demonstrations in Colour and Stereophonic Sound. He has captured some part of the essence of our times, almost like a last message in a bottle, floating in the sea.
Robert Vas, Sight and Sound, Winter 1961/2
Paris nous appartient Paris Belongs to Us
Director: Jacques Rivette
Production Companies: AJYM Films, Les Films du Carrosse
Producer: Roland Nonin
Unit Manager: Robert Lachenay
Assistants: Jean Herman, Isabelle Phat, Alain Pozarnik
Script Girl: Laura Mauri
Scenario/Dialogue: Jacques Rivette, Jean Gruault
Director of Photography: Charles Bitsch
Camera Assistant: André Mrugalski
Key Grip: Bernard Largemains
Stills Photography: Georges Pierre *
Editor: Denise de Casabianca
Assisted by: Ghislaine Desjonquères
Laboratory: GTC Joinville France
Music: Philippe Arthuys
With the collaboration of: Ivo Malec
Guitar: Jean Borredon
Sound Recordist: Christian Hackspill
Dialogue Coach: Suzanne Schiffman
‘Babel’ sequence extracted from the film ‘Metropolis’ by: Fritz Lang (Courtesy of: Ufa, La Cinémathèque française)
Cast
Betty Schneider (Anne Goupil)
Giani Esposito (Gérard Lenz)
Françoise Prévost (Terry Yordan)
Daniel Crohem (Philip Kaufman)
François Maistre (Pierre Goupil)
Birgitta Juslin (Finnish model)
Noëlle Leiris
Monique Le Porrier
Malka Ribowska
Louise Roblin (guest at party in Neuilly)
Anne Zamire (woman with baby)
Paul Bisciglia (Paul, member of theatre group)
Jean-Pierre Delage
Claus Von Lorbach
Jean Martin
Henri Poirier (member of theatre group)
André Thorent (Bernard)
Jane Car
Jacqueline Dupuis
Claire Fischer
Teresa Gracia
Danielle Vercoutre
Liliane Weiner
Roland Daviller
Fernand George
François Robert
José Sebastian
Jean-Marie Robain (Jean-Bernard George)
Hans Lucas
Jean-Claude Brialy (Jean-Marc)
Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette (guests at party in Neuilly) *
Jean-Luc Godard (man at café) *
Jacques Demy *
France 1961
141 mins
35mm
*Uncredited
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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