Ingénues at large

>> Va savoir should know better

by JOANNE LATIMER

Films about actors putting on a play require the highest tolerance for flaky plots. The play-within-a-film format can feel more like torture than structure. Sure, Kenneth Branagh's A Midwinter's Tale and John Cassevetes' Opening Night are wonderful films, but how many in their genre can pull it off so well?

Va savoir struggles to make the grade. It's a French film by Jacques Rivette about an Italian theatre troupe on tour in Europe. Their French ingénue, Camille (Jeanne Balibar), is uneasy about their upcoming gig in Paris, a city she fled three years ago. She's returning home to do As You Desire Me, by Luigi Pirandello, and the audience has the thankless task of watching long clips from the theatrical performance as well as long clips of her hand-wringing in the hotel. She's about to self-destruct, taking down some of her colleagues, but why we should care remains a mystery.

Camille is involved with the troupe's director, Ugo (Sergio Castellitto), but she's anxious about seeing her old lover in Paris. Ugo is anxious about finding a lost manuscript by Goldoni, the next play he plans to direct. Rumpled old Ugo attracts the affections of a young Parisian girl (!) at the research library where he begins his hunt for the manuscript. By sheer coincidence, the young girl happens to be the daughter of the woman with a private library where Goldoni's manuscript may be buried.

Ugo spends his days with young Dominique (Hélène de Fougerolles), flirting and searching through old books, while Camille talks to herself and frets about making contact with ex-boyfriend Pierre (Jacques Bonnaffé).

Rivette went to great pains to make every frame look dramatic and the burden shows. His concentration of effort on style, however, leaves us with an emotionally tinny thespian drama.

To help thicken the plot, Rivette throws in a dash of criminality, kidnapping and infidelity, but how much sympathy can we be expected to have for people who purposefully rattle skeletons in their own closets? It's too easy to remain at a distance from his caste of egoists. And Rivette kills any momentum he manages to create with the stilted scenes of the troupe performing Pirandello's play--in Italian. Va savoir, indeed.

Va savoir opens Friday, Dec. 7