★ 7 / 10
Filmed over the course of three years, and
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Filmed over the course of three years, and considered as one of the pioneering efforts in the Nouvelle Vague, Rivette's absorbing debut is a mystery film that…
Filmed over the course of three years, and considered as one of the pioneering efforts in the Nouvelle Vague, Rivette's absorbing debut is a mystery film that refuses to be conventional, even if the three-year time span rises some inconsistencies to the surface.
Since the very beginning, Rivette asks us to make a leap of faith. What is introduced as a suicide slowly escalates into the investigation of an international conspiracy, where the lives of a group of Spaniards seems to be in danger. The style alone and the events discussed, even if misunderstood for a considerable amount of time during the first half, are interesting enough thanks to the performances and some impressionistic glances at the city of Paris interacting with this bunch of mysterious souls. Nothing is as clear as it seems, and yet, you want to keep figuring out more. In this sense, Betty Schneider's character, Anne Goupil, becomes the easiest one to empathize with. The rest of the characters are strange Hitchcockian derivatives with unclear and maybe paranoiac personal issues.
Beyond the performances and how events are presented in fragments, which may frustrate some viewers as it takes a lot of time to explain those pieces of story, the style is the one that keeps your eyes glued to the screen. For a debut, it is an interesting effort, showing close-ups and wide vistas of Paris as if it wasn't a first directorial effort. Ironically, the film presents this conspiracy plot with a theatrical backdrop, where a key character directs a play adaptation of Shakespeare's Pericles, maybe signaling some possible past, present or future tragedy, with the intensity of classic Greek theater. This brings me to mention the parallelism between the scenes of the play and how overtly theatrical the performances are by the actors in the movie, maybe intentionally(?), which I found something difficult to grasp given the seriousness and scope of imagined-vs.real paranoia and international conspiracies.
Although the effort is uneven and unnecessarily time-consuming - unlike the other gigantic films by Rivette in terms of running time - and it doesn't always consummate its entire web of secondary subplots and malevolent intentions, Paris Is Ours is an interesting exercise in style and the mystery genre with good performances, experienced visuals and a film that transmits that Paris, indeed, doesn't belong to anyone.
75/100
P.S. Be on the lookout for cameos by Rivette himself, Chabrol, Demy, and finally Godard, the latter ridiculously attempting to be as cool-looking as the cameo of Melville in his debut Breathless (1960). Godard simply cannot feel confident without a pair of shades...
★ 7 / 10
George Sanders in his analysis of Checkov's "In
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George Sanders in his analysis of Checkov's "In the Cart" highlights the duty of the author to bring the reader along like a sidecar to a motorbike. Here, we…
George Sanders in his analysis of Checkov's "In the Cart" highlights the duty of the author to bring the reader along like a sidecar to a motorbike. Here, we are that sidecar to Anne, a fabulously flawed narrator inadvertently introduced to and then a tourist in a confused, conspiratorial post war pseudo intellectual world with all the suspicious terror of the McCarthy trials. She is our Dorothy, our Alice discovering a micro community obsessed with murder, intrigue and half truths that are less than they appear. Film noir at its best and a template of what a spy film should be, where our protagonist is always the last to know. Maxi bon.
80%
TOMATOMETER
· 15 reviews
70%
AUDIENCE
· 500 ratings
6.7/10
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Thanks FREEMAN!