‘Va Savoir+’ or — Having Our Cake and Eating it?

Jacques Rivette’s ‘Va Savoir+’ (2001) opens with a theatre troupe rehearsing a play somewhere in Paris but, then again, this shouldn’t surprise us in the slightest because theatre and Paris are as synonymous with Rivette as tension is to Hitchcock, control is to Kubrick or the films of Richard Attenborough are to the words ‘excruciatingly’ and ‘tedious’.

Camille (Jeanne Balibar) and Ugo (Sergio Castellitto) are married. He’s a theatre director and she’s his leading actress. Their troupe is in Paris touring a production of Luigi Pirandello’s play ‘Come Tu Mi Vuoi’ (As You Want Me) in its original Italian. Camille is suffering from severe nerves although this is less to do with the play and more her fears that she still may still be harbouring feelings for her ex-lover, Pierre, someone she left in Paris three years ago. She tentatively attempts to track him down.

Ugo, meanwhile, is searching Paris for an unpublished, and thought long lost, play by Carlo Goldoni. This search brings Ugo into contact with a beautiful librarian, Dominique, and, by extension, her jealous half-brother, Arthur. Together, Ugo and Dominique attempt to track the play down.

It doesn’t take long (relatively speaking that is because this, after all, Jacques Rivette we’re dealing with here) until these two searches intertwine and the various characters involved both forge and reveal a network of unique connections. As this occurs we gradually suspect events in “real life’ and those in the play are starting to mirror, or inform, each other. The only question remains — will this be tragedy or farce?

At first we’re a tad unsure if even Rivette himself knows the answer to that question but after about an hour or so Rivette’s love of Renoir, Hawks, Tashlin and Lubitsch becomes impossible to repress and the comedy comes pouring out. Doors, stairways, misunderstandings and other potential barriers, both physical and psychological, that easily could herald misfortune or emotional isolation are quickly utilised for laughs, only Rivette is pulling it all off in such a sly manner it can take a while to notice.

A fantastic example is the hilarious dinner party scene where Pierre has invited Camille and Ugo to his apartment so he can meet Ugo and Camille and meet Pierre’s partner, Sonia. This should, hopefully, put Ugo and Sonia’s suspicions at rest that Pierre and Camille aren’t having an affair, but we know the situation is pregnant with potential catastrophe.

What follows is one of the funniest dinner party scenes ever filmed as Ugo, a theatre director, and Pierre, a philosophy professor, engage in an immature battle of male egos only instead of flexing their muscles or sexual virility they get into an argument about Heidegger. It’s incredibly funny stuff (it’s certainly the funniest argument about Heidegger I’ve ever seen), especially when Sonia tells Pierre that Heidegger was pretentious and silly for making up words for things when words for those things already exist. And she’s not wrong!

Likewise when Ugo’s theatre troupe finally revolt because they haven’t been paid. This is because nobody is turning up for their shows along with Ugo having spent a vast fortune on needlessly extravagant scenery, and it’s only at this precise moment we realise that for this production of Pirandello Ugo’s had a set so monumentally vast constructed it looks like it was designed by Ken Adam for a Bond movie.

This is easily one of Jacques Rivette’s most delightfully playful movies and one crammed with nods and references to his previous work such as ‘Celine and Julie Go Boating’ (1974), ‘Out 1’ (1971) and especially ‘Paris Nous Appartient’ (1961), only here Paris is a city filled not with conspiracies of Cold War paranoia but the joy of play and playing. By the time Peggy Lee’s rendition of ‘Senza Fine’ kicks in at the end we realise Rivette hasn’t just provided us with a happy ending but with the ULTIMATE in happy endings. He even wheels out a cake for us at the climax only this is a self-regenerating cake meaning the enjoyment is continuous. Just like the end of ‘Celine and Julie Go Boating’ the sensation is that our ecstasy is eternal.