Flashback: Va Savoir, aka Who Knows? (2001) – Jacques Rivette’s passionate, intellectual parlour piece
A superb cast renders perfectly formed characters in the French film director’s cinematic master stroke about the complexities of love
It’s been a good year for French New Wave director Jacques Rivette in Hong Kong, with his classic 1974 Celine and Julie Go Boating and the experimental Out 1 (1971) both screening in cinemas here. Va Savoir (2001) – which translates as Who Knows– dates from much later in his career, although it shares a fascination with the theatre with both those films.
Rivette, who died in 2016, left a body of work that ranges from the experimental to the uncategorisable to the deeply dramatic. Va Savoir could be described as a parlour piece, were its characters not so passionate, so intellectual, and so passionately intellectual. It is a deft, clever work which possesses a lightness of touch that belies its sublime understanding of relationships.
The story revolves around some muddled romances, and has been described as being about nothing much in particular. That is true in the sense that it’s a restrained, composed film with no high drama, and some – albeit refined – scenes of screwball comedy. But the characters are so perfectly formed, and so blessed (or cursed) with the trappings of humanity, with all its irrational desires, odd compulsions and unexpected satisfactions, the film ends up being much deeper than it pretends.