Photo: Jeanne Balibar as Camille in Jacques Rivette's Va Savoir
Va Savoir is a labored offering from Nouvelle Vague auteur Jacques Rivette. Broken up with play-within-a-film segments from Luigi Pirandelo's As You Desire Me, the film finds Rivette in familiar terrain. His exploration of the conflict between fiction and reality isn't so much tiresome as it is tiresomely ancient, and similar to some of his more volatile works (The Nun and Celine and Julie Go Boating), the film is leisurely paced but frustrating. Rivette is headily conscious of the way characters move through doorways and interior spaces, but Va Savoir seems burdened by the director's philosophical interest in the duality between illusion and actuality, which serves little importance to the film's actual narrative center, a more or less straightforward tale of Rohmerian discord.
Va Savoir is a labored offering from Nouvelle Vague auteur Jacques Rivette. Broken up with play-within-a-film segments from Luigi Pirandelo's As You Desire Me, the film finds Rivette in familiar terrain. His exploration of the conflict between fiction and reality isn't so much tiresome as it is tiresomely ancient, and similar to some of his more volatile works (The Nun and Celine and Julie Go Boating), the film is leisurely paced but frustrating. Rivette is headily conscious of the way characters move through doorways and interior spaces, but Va Savoir seems burdened by the director's philosophical interest in the duality between illusion and actuality, which serves little importance to the film's actual narrative center, a more or less straightforward tale of Rohmerian discord.
