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Jacques Rivette's sly, blithe comedy is so damn enchanting, its serene wit so elegant and charmant , that one is reminded of Renoir's remark: “I'm getting old, now I play Mozart.” Not that the wily Rivette suddenly changed his paranoid tone or his obsession with the interplay of theatre and life. He returns here to the environs of his first film, PARIS NOUS APPARTIENT, and of his mid-career masterpiece, L'AMOUR FOU, and pulls off a giddy update of his favourite theme: the two-way shuttle between artifice and reality. The pixieish Jeanne Balibar anchors the complicated narrative as the lead actress of a troupe run by her Italian lover, Ugo. Performing Pirandello's As You Desire Me , itself a play about role-playing, she finds herself suddenly drawn into the past, and the unrequited love she had for an obtuse, possibly sinister philosophy professor. Structured around a series of search missions - for the professor, for a ring, for a lost manuscript by eighteenth-century playwright Goldoni - VA SAVOIR gets giddier as Rivette keeps adding more lovers to the roundelay, more plot turns and reversals, more secrets, lies, conspiracies, and stratagems to the vaulting plot. Shamelessly turning on the charm and boldly advancing into the physical and the farcical, VA SAVOIR has the elaborate structure and glittering artifice of Ophuls, even when its buffo ending goes for broke. (The duel by vodka is already a classic.) The opening-night film for the 2001 New York Film Festival, and a major critical hit, VA SAVOIR is an “elegant, eccentric and thoroughly delightful metropolitan comedy. . . . Don't miss it” (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian ). PG
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