Paris Belongs to Us (1961, Jacques Rivette) (Patreon)

61/100

"It's all your fault. You sought the sublime." Amused and pleased to discover that Rivette was on his delightful bullshit from the very beginning (with a brief detour to The Nun's convent), alternating between the theater and conspiracies—both of which lend themselves to heightened emotion—in a perversely matter-of-fact register. In a lot of ways, Belongs to Us does for Paris what Under the Silver Lake would later do for Los Angeles, viz. transform the city into a  locus of vague, incomprehensible menace that the protagonist worries (s)he may be imagining; in both films, the person just sort of stumbles onto a curious thread and can't stop pulling at it, even as things get progressively darker. Anne's a much more benign character, though, which makes her less interesting to me. It's been decades since my sole viewing of L'Amour fou (which I disliked at the time), so maybe I'm off-base, but it feels to me as if Rivette finally achieved the right balance by finding, in Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier, two actors whose own playfulness and curiosity matched that of the film's bizarre conceit. (There's a little of that percolating through Out 1's 13 hours, to be sure. But it doesn't dominate.) Betty Schneider, who never quite developed a career despite also appearing in such classics as Mon Oncle and Classe tous risques, tends to politely blend into the scenery, especially early on, so a sense of mystery and danger is maddeningly slow to take hold. I spent much of the first hour focused on Rivette's faultless exterior compositions, which find casually striking angles that carry a lot of the affective load. 

Also notable is his use of extremely quick dissolves, which create a feeling of being yanked along a path by forces beyond one's control. Still, if Godard's cameo constitutes your movie's most memorable performance, you've got a bit of a problem, and I didn't truly get interested until Terry finally articulates the New World Order-ish paranoia that's virulently infected Anne's brother's friends. Actually, that's not true—unusually for Rivette during these early years, he keeps the theatrical-rehearsal scenes brief and engaging; there are even some big laughs when Gérard sells out to mainstream producers and has to endure their moronic notes, which include casting little people as extras for perspective's sake. Unless I missed something, though, Pericles itself doesn't dovetail with Anne's personal saga in any way, so that stuff plays like a fun digression rather than as an integral element of an all-encompassing hopeless malaise. Possibly I'd like Paris Belongs to Us significantly more were I to watch it again with foreknowledge of its arresting destination, but I think it's just initially low on hilariously portentous-cryptic lines like "Who sent you? The lamb or the dragon?" (pro tip: say "lamb") and could have used a slightly more dynamic lead. I'll grudgingly forgive the most distracting dubbed dialogue scene of all time, in which the actor on location literally eats half a baguette over the course of a conversation but the actor who spoke the lines later (no idea if it's the same guy or someone else) clearly has no food in his mouth—we get the sound of bites, but not the sound of heavy-duty chewing. First feature!