The cinema of Jacques Rivette received a spectacular spotlight during Judith Godrèche’s speech at the Césars evening, Friday February 23, which concluded with a quote from Céline and Julie go by boat (1974). The publisher Potemkin, pursuing a long-term work on Rivettian filmography, releases the exquisite Find out more, one of the rare luminous titles of a restless work. The acronym “+” applies to the long version of a film released in theaters in 2001, with seventy minutes less for commercial convenience. Rivette then restored it, in 2002, in its original edit (3:44), a priority in his eyes, which the edition takes note of, the short version being included only as a bonus.
Time is the best ally of Rivette’s cinema, who never had the heart to limit the length of his films, of which he often made several versions. Find out more you gain in ease, in facets, in convolutions. The plot does not change, but what the length enriches is the relationship of the film to the theater, one of the filmmaker’s obsessions. “All films are about the theater, there is no other subject”he declared in 1968.
An Italian troupe passing through Paris plays As you want me (1929), by Luigi Pirandello, in the text, in front of sparse rooms. Camille (Jeanne Balibar), the main actress, forms with Ugo (Sergio Castellitto), the troupe leader, a couple in turbulence, whose bonds are weakening. During the day, everyone goes elsewhere. She follows in the footsteps of a poorly cooled love with Pierre (Jacques Bonnaffé), a touchy philosophy teacher in a relationship with Sonia (Marianne Basler). Him on the trail of a lost manuscript by Carlo Goldoni with the help of the student Dominique (Hélène de Fougerolles), scolded by his half-brother Arthur (Bruno Todeschini). Through a domino effect, the split couple opens up to other alliances, other ways of forming a duo.
Crossed paths in love
Find out more is, if we can say so, Rivette’s “Italian” film: by its partly transalpine casting, of course, but also by its language games, its verbal musicality steeped in grace notes, its temptation to move towards comedy, its characters colorful like harlequins. A sumptuous machinery of romantic crossovers unfolds there. The plan, which Rivette makes tend towards a maximum of dramatic unity, is constantly measured against the plans, those speculative ones, which the characters have in their heads, and which remain elusive to us. The camera shows itself with a devious flexibility, its reptilian sliding movements accompanying the amorous fluctuations, the tensions and magnetisms, as one would trace arabesques in a Paris of a thousand passages.
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