Paris Belongs to Us (1961) User Reviews

Surprising blend of New Wave and classical literature

[rooprect · 7/10 · 12 March 2007]

I suppose that's a bit of an oxymoron: to blend New Wave and classical literature. After all, New Wave is the cinematic movement that prided itself with trashing the standard literary formula. I equate New Wave to free-form jazz which trashed the standard classical music structure in favour of expression & improv.

Well I'm not a big fan of New Wave (or free-form jazz), so it was rather begrudgingly that I watched this film. Surely enough, it begain in a sort of expressionistic delirium, prompting me to say, "oh great. here we go again. haiku anyone?" But suddenly it reins in, and a very lucid story materializes out of the haze. I was pleasantly surprised. There are many compelling allusions--if not outright parallels--with the classic play "Pericles, Prince of Tyre" as well as Molière and Goethe. This means that the film adopts a certain bit of structure, which is highly unusual for New Wave. I found it very refreshing. With philosophical overtones of Sartre and Camus as well, it's by far the most head-scratching, beard-stroking New Wave film I've seen, and it's not just existentialistic babble either (although there is a hefty share of existentialism).

Its biggest flaw, however, is that it seems to attacks too many themes at once, and in so doing, it dilutes the power it could have had. There's only so much that can be packed into a film, even if it is 140 mins. As a few other reviewers have pointed out, the ideas presented are truncated. Mere fragments. The director intended this, as we see in a dialogue where two characters discuss how the play Pericles is a very fragmented tale which comes together only at the end. HOWEVER, in the case of "Paris nous appartient", it doesn't seem to come together. Whether this was deliberate irony on the director's part or whether it was just poor execution, I can't say. But either way it left me unfulfilled.

It is possible that I missed something. Perhaps I should see it a 2nd time, but unfortunately it falls just shy of the good-enough-to-see-a-2nd-time mark. I did enjoy it, and I'm glad I watched it, but I probably wouldn't care to see it again.

If you see this movie and agree with what I've written, then I think you'll enjoy the film "Orphée" (1950).

Oh, and just a word about the music in this film (since I've already made the analogy of jazz), it's... well... wacky. It's really the equivalent of jazz improv except with symphonic instruments. At times it fits the absurdity of the moment perfectly. But at other times, especially during the dialogue, it can be a bit distracting. I kept wondering to myself how much better it would have been with just a single brooding piano instead of the experimental orchestra noises. But music is entirely a personal taste, so you may enjoy it.

Interesting, some minor flaws

[olethrosdc · 8/10 · 3 March 2003]

This is an unusual film. It revolves around a group of characters that are slightly connected to each other through their artistic tendencies and/or political beliefs. The group is presented well - it is quite realistic, even though it is so colourful. This is perhaps because the criteria for being part of the group are so 'normal'. Friends, people with similar interests.. acquaintance networks - this is something that is presented very well in the film.

A sinister undercurent pervades the whole movie: a background plot that is never revealed, or shown directly - it is something that the characters speak to each other about and make reference to. While in other movies the conspiracy plot would have been the central theme, here it is pushed into the background, delegated to a simple object of discussion - the movie instead revolves around the lives of the characters and in particular, the protagonist's, from whose point of view the situation is seen. By bringing the focus onto the characters and their daily lives, illusions and aspirations, the movie manages to to breathe fresh life into what would have otherwise been just another conspiracy film.

A few technical things: The acting is not very consistent. The parisian scenes were very good and the photography was aesthetically pleasing. The music enhanced the atmosphere significantly, though some of its psychedelic overtowns were a bit overpowering at points (making the dialogue hard to follow - if the intention was to transfer the confusion/paranoia to the viewer, it was appropriate, however).

It's not a masterpiece, but it is definitely interesting and worth watching at least once.

Gripping and interesting with a disappointing end

[charchuk · 8/10 · 21 October 2007]

It's like the New Wave version of a mystery/conspiracy thriller, and in that regard it works really well. The black and white cinematography suits the tone perfectly, even if the very poor quality of the film makes it hard to tell, and it's supported by some disorienting editing and a great use of light and shadows. There's also a really terrific score, probably one of the best for this genre. Even though the film runs 140 minutes, it never really feels boring, as the conversations between characters are gripping enough to keep the viewer's interest. The story is rather strange, as it appears to be non-linear and occasionally irrelevant, but it seems to work out at the end. However, unfortunately, the end is a complete disappointment, as it attempts to hammer home some political viewpoints that just end up being confusing, and then coasts to a unsatisfactory finish without really tying up any of the loose ends. It's an interesting watch, and you could do a lot worse, but it's no masterpiece.

Either macrocosms or not

[chaos-rampant · 27 June 2011]

We have a rather intimidating tappestry here at first sight, about a web of Parisian lives connected to each other and informed by a bunch of nested references. To a mysterious suicide and a missing sound tape, to a staging of a Shakespeare play as mirror of the film we are watching, to shadowy conspiracies supposedly pulling the strings of what we see from a higher, unseen level.

So we have a film-within, as often with Nouvelle Vague, but also a film without. Or better yet, the film we are watching as devised by unseen minds above shaping its world. Bridged by actors (and non-actors) who act parts knowingly or unknowingly, who may be chess pawns moved in turn by other pawns. The idea is that eventually we never get to find out how much of what we saw was this game and whether or not the game was imagined or masking a sinister plot.

So far so good, a complex film in which to superimpose the various grids. Yet at the same time not so complex after all, rather obvious in how it handles us the various keys.

For example; describing the play he's staging, the director says that he welcomes the challenge of bringing order to the convoluted mesh of different roles, that the world of the play is chaotic but not absurd. Does anyone have doubts that we're watching a surrogate Rivette describe the film? Then the stuff about conspiracies. The idea is of course that they may or may not be true, yet in getting there we are treated with naive politics about money ruling the world, a policed, monitored world.

In the finale we get some rather interesting insinuations about where the mind conspiring for answers in the face of an uncertain world leads us. When anything is imagined to be possibly true, nothing is.

The one notion that holds some actual power in all this, is precisely the one that is not explicit. A film noir plot elusively unraveling in the background of so much distraction, about a mistress and her ex-lover arranging murders as suicides. Why, to what end, again open ends. We may or may not imagine this, but this ambiguity is ours.

We would later find in the films of David Lynch and Raoul Ruiz all this situated back in the imaginative mind, where all our fanciful storytelling begins and where the illusionary images (bent by desire) we use to represent reality are born. In more cinematic ways, more fluid. This maintains the appearance of an ordinary world, it's talky, and the camera is not adventurous. It's never really dangerous, except until too late, or passionately engaged in its codas.

But one of the places this mode begins is here, in nascent form. Earlier yet, it was film noir, which the film references and even innovates in an important way, ingenious for its time (by making the noir plot the vague inference, and the karmic forces of noir the explicit reference and actively recognized by the characters). Although it often appeared clearcut and about a simple crime, it was riskier stuff in the right hands.

(A few more words on this: with noir we view a threatening cityscape where cast upon it are shadows of the mind, illusions of desire about a woman or money which in turn distort what is perceived of reality. With the post-noir landscapes (such as in Lynch), we experience instead the world of the mind - now the shadows are inverted, they're pieces of reality which seep back as filmic devices, which the mind arranges into a movie plot that sustains the illusion! This is for me one of the most fascinating journeys available in cinema, from Shangai to Inland Empire, and Rivette's film may not have refined as much but it's an important link in the transition.)

Ride the Wave

[gavin6942 · 7/10 · 15 September 2017]

Anne Goupil (Betty Schneider) is a literature student in Paris in 1957. Her elder brother, Pierre, takes her to a friend's party where the guests include Philip Kaufman, an expatriate American escaping McCarthyism, and Gerard Lenz, a theater director who arrives with the mysterious woman Terry.

Begun in 1957 and completed three years later, it was then-critic Jacques Rivette's first full-length film as a director and one of the first works of the French New Wave, though it was not released theatrically until 1961. Oddly, it seems to be one of the lesser-known today, despite being a fascinatingly odd mystery.

Apparently many people say this film is "like a David Lynch movie". That similarity is there, so I appreciate that... but then the question becomes, does that mean that David Lynch films are "like a Jacques Rivette movie" since Rivette came first by quite a few years?

The young men look far too old to be going around acting in the way they do

[christopher-underwood · 6/10 · 17 June 2019]

A rather wordy first feature from Jacques Rivette set in 1957 and probably filmed that year as we know it took some time to get a release. If the film had difficulties back in the day it would seem it has even more now. The young men look far too old to be going around acting in the way they do yet we are presented with this bunch of alienated persons, alienated either by their own existentialist attitude and stated beliefs or their immigrant status. One has fled Spain another the fruits of Mccarthyism in the US and all meet and disperse, foretelling of doom, murder and suicide. At the same time a production of Shakespeare's Pericles is being attempted and although I do not know the play I understand the problems of staging it is an ongoing feature and the unresolved nature of much of the play is reflected here in the story of alienated 'youth'.

Paranoia, Pericles, and a mysterious Paris at the beginnings of the House of Fiction

[OldAle1 · 10/10 · 20 February 2009]

A few critics, noting Rivette's general lack of recognition in comparison with Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer and Chabrol, have wondered if his "late start" might have had anything to do with it; this film didn't have its American release until 1962 or a British premiere until 1964 by which point the New Wave was already a well-established "movement" in people's minds and this long 16mm talk-fest about conspiracies and theater must have looked weird and out of place even compared to the experimentation of Godard.

I'm not so sure. Rivette's films have usually been hermetic worlds unto themselves, most readily relatable to each other and to the worlds of theater and other movies - apart from "La Religieuse" all of Rivette's work over his first 30 years of feature-making seem to inhabit what has been called his "House of Fiction", an area just a little off from the real world and one in which obsession, madness, and duration (at 140 minutes "Paris" is one of his shortest films) rule. Also his focus on the lives and romances of women and the near-exclusion of the kinds of macho American gangster-influenced characters that inhabit many of Godard's and Truffaut's early films wouldn't be likely to endear him to wider audiences. Interestingly enough, Rivette is just as obsessed with Americana as his contemporaries, and in fact the first words spoken in this film are in English, haltingly read aloud by a young woman in a tiny and somewhat decrepit apartment in Paris.

Before this, as the credits roll, we see Paris, a grimy, silent and derelict-looking 19th-century city of endless 5 to 7 story apartments and wide but empty streets; our first view is from an unseen train, accompanied by eerie music heavy on wailing strings and percussion (by Phillippe Arthuys - the soundtrack is spare but frightening and beautiful throughout). A title, "June 1957" and we enter the world of Anne, our young reader, and her contemporaries, a lost and unfocused group of intellectuals, bohemians, actors and writers. Anne hears crying and screaming from an apartment next door - the young woman within seems both upset (in tears) and ecstatic - she know's Anne's brother, Pierre, who apparently is in danger from somewhere, something, somewhat - it is unclear - the same danger that "murdered" Juan, and before him Assunta. She has the look of excited madness as she claims that the whole world, in fact, is in danger. Anne is confused; she meets Pierre at a café, and he shrugs it off.

Next we find Anne and Pierre both at a party, lots of mostly young intellectuals squeezed into another tiny apartment - a man plays guitar and the conversation revolves around this same Juan (who was also a guitarist, and composer), only it appears that he committed suicide -- or did he? We are also introduced to Philip Kaufman, apparently a famous American writer though he seems destitute and unhinged here. There are cameos by the director and Claude Chabrol, and the talk is charged and political, but direction-less. Snatches of conversation, withheld glances bespeak something going on, conspiracies and traitors and some evil that hangs over everyone...eventually Anne accompanies Philip on a long walk (filmed very much like a scene out of a hard-edged American noir) where he expounds on his own conspiracy theories. Everything it seems revolves around this Juan, and when Anne falls in with a troupe of actors rehearsing a seemingly impossible adaptation of Shakespeare's Pericles she finds out that the music to it was by Juan, but it is apparently lost.

Gerard, the play's director, soon casts Anne as a replacement for one of his many departing actors; there is much made of people leaving and disappearing throughout the film, often for unsaid or unknown reasons. Anne and Gerard become romantically entwined also, but like most romances in the film it is ephemeral and unpredictable, and both have other entanglements. Eventually Anne takes it upon herself to find a tape of this music, which becomes the driving force of the latter half of the film, if this portrait of half-truths and romantic obsessions with dark powers and political intrigues can be said to have a real plot at all. It's a red herring, of course, much like the Maltese falcon, another homage to or parallel with the world of noir - in fact psychologically, if not plot-wise, this may be the most noirish of all the early New Wave films.

I first saw Paris probably 15 years ago in the crappy old cut version available on VHS in the USA and this was my first re-watch, in the fine recent release from the BFI on Region 2 DVD. It's fascinating to return to it again after having seen nearly all of the director's subsequent work and to find that nearly all of his great themes and interests are present in this first feature made 50 years ago: complex romantic tangles, obsessions with conspiracies that may or may not exist, the city as playground, female friendships, theater - nearly all of Rivette's life's work can be found in nascent form here. One marked difference from everything that comes after is in the soundtrack, post-synchronized here, and this is rather unnerving when one is used to the direct sound that the director has mastered. Yet it works in Paris, the lack of street noises and the focus on individual voices and the eerie soundtrack music contributing to a view of the city as nightmarish, a place of loners and loneliness, of the permanent outsiders, of madness in the face of an obscure modern world. The last scene, as Anne's gaze wanders off following birds flying across the water, is emblematic too of this cryptic loner. Nothing is truly revealed, and more questions remain than were ever answered.

A masterpiece, and for my money every bit as important as any of the other films from the dawn of the New Wave.

The Contemptuous Camera

[boblipton · 7/10 · 19 July 2020]

:It's 1957. Betty Schneider is a student who gets involved in small acting troupe. As the rehearsals proceed, she notices odd things, and begins to suspect some secret organization is responsible for the death of the American journalist, novelist and music composer for the show, Daniel Crohem.

Jacques Rivette's first feature shows the gelid calm that appeared in most of his movies. with politics and assassination merging in a manner that Hollywood would only tackle in the 1970s.... usually with an air of hysteria. There are a lot of shots around Paris that makes the city a cynical observer of these human goings-on, a subjective camera that views the affair with contempt. I wonder how cameraman Charles Bitsch got that effect.

Lynchesque conspiracy - very interesting

[AristarchosTheArchivist · 9/10 · 25 February 2002]

If you like David Lynch's films, you might enjoy "Paris nous appartient". After having seen it, I still did not know what it was really about. This film develops an atmosphere of sheer mystery, which will never be solved completely. On the other hand, it also touches the political situation of the 50s. The overall existence of conspiracy is very appealing, as is the innocent character of Anne. Music and camerawork are very unusual, the latter making the film rank among the best of the European New Wave.

9 out of 10.

7.1/10. I liked it but it's not for everyone

[athanasiosze · 7/10 · 29 February 2024]

This is the second Rivette movie i watch, previous one was "La Belle Noiseuse". LBN is a better movie. PARIS BELONG TO US is a very strange movie but that's something everyone can guess just reading the synopsis and the plot. One can say there are political undertones here or a "Lynchian" vibe, even Kafkaesque. Whereas i don't necessarily disagree, i would say that this is not that political/cryptic/nightmarish. It's more drama than mystery and most of the questions were answered in the ending, even though the answers are not so satisfying.

In any case, i liked it a lot. Pace is very good for a 140 minutes French art movie of the 60's. It's interesting, it made me invest and i was curious to see where it goes. Great as a time capsule, Paris was wonderful. Actors are great. This is one of the movies that you should watch a second time for understanding it completely. I won't though. It's good but it is not THAT good. Pace was good as i said but it should have been at least 10-15 minutes shorter. For a 140 minutes movie, it should have been more intriguing to call it a great movie. And the ending was probably clever but i didn't like it, so much for nothing.

But there was some brilliant dialogue here. Way too cynical for its time of course. I think this is a timeless movie, hasn't aged a bit. Less obscure than it seems. If this description made you curious too, watch it, you won't be disappointed.

New wave letdown

[adamwarlock · 5/10 · 13 August 2020]

Rivette is perhaps the least known of the 5 Cahiers directors of the New Wave. I've only seen The Nun before and I enjoyed it. This first feature was disappointing to me. Great location work and photography but way too long. Basically a pretty, naive girl gets involved with a bunch of pretentious a-holes who suggest a suicide was a murder and she tries to play amateur detective. Not in the sense an American film like this would. It's mostly her confronting different people who tell her enough to keep her interested but no evidence is found. The film mentions creeping fascism in the forms of McCarthyism in the US and the Franco regime in Spain. But is it all just paranoia? By the end, I could care less and it turned out to be much ado over nothing (Shakespeare). I don't get what this film was trying to achieve. I assume Rivete was a leftist so is he criticizing them or supporting them? Might have been better with the running time cut and a new ending. This isn't The 400 Blows or breathless or even Le Beau Surge.

One of the Nouvelle Vague revolutionary portraits, decoding and renovating the crime genre

[titobacciarini · 9/10 · 6 November 2018]

The story takes place in Paris from June 1957, it is a very gloomy period of the history of France: there is a deep political and economic instability as well as a climate of general tension for the Cold War (France was losing the french colonies in Africa, claimed by the natives).

Synopsis:

Anne is a young, curious and innocent student. A neighbour of the room is in a frenzy, stating that his brother Juan (refugee from the regime of Franco) was killed and now they are all doomed. Later, through her brother Pierre, the girl makes the acquaintance of a group of his friends. Juan's suicide is a hot topic and considered controversial by the members of the group, whose peculiarity is being politically skeptical, having revolutionary ideologies. Among them, there's the responsible for a theatrical mise en scéne of the Shakespearean drama Pericles, as well as Philip, an American refugee from McCarthyism with paranoid conspiracy theories. He slaps Terry, femme fatale and former lover of Juan, currently in a relationship with Gerard and blaming him for causing or induced Juan's death. Anne begins to establish confidence with Philip and coincidentally takes part in Gerard's recital by replacing the previously designated actress. So Anne, because of her own curiosity and thrust by Philip's speeches inherent suspected conspiracies, begins to investigate to resolve the problem, which changes during the course of history and is never exactly identified. In addition, even the clues and the same investigations of Anne prove unnecessary because they do not lead, in the end, to the solution of the mystery (s). Looking for a recording, the girl comes across a doctor named De Georges, connected, according to Philip, to a secret organization struggling for power. Worried about Gerard's safety, the girl is more and more involved in the business around him and the suicide of Juan by focusing his suspicions on Terry. Later, Gerard, given up by Terry and after having been refused by Anne, commits suicide. Eventually, after the death of Pierre (probably killed by Terry), Anne comes out more confused than before, while Terry and Philip go away together.

Comment:

The film opens with a sentence written by Peguy: "Paris n'appartient à personne", witnessing the reception of the city and its cosmopolitan being. The opposite word game of the title mirrors the revolutionary circle that is created around the characters, even if their actions do not often lead to a continuation of the plot or a clarification of the events, deliberately concealed behind a network of small details, basically unnecessary. It is therefore a plot similar to the mystery or detective genre (although at times romantic, thriller and drama) but differs considerably from the canons that characterize the genre, also because it is only deluded to the spectator the possibility of interacting as a detective, like the illusion chased by Anne. Rivette exhibits the elusiveness of reality through these McGuffin, making the film volatile and playing with the spectator; actions often take a short time while unnecessary dialogues and acts are dilated at length (varying the speed of the detach between sequences). A film that can irritate in its subversion: as a revolutionary rebellion, it imposes a careful vision, but not an analysis regulated by specific narrative parameters. At times cryptically dreamlike, an aura of mystery, a sort of anarchist esotericism, constitutes a veritable manifesto of the Nouvelle Vague. Less romantic but similar in concept to "L'Amour fou", it is a very thoughtful film, especially at political and existential level: Probably Rivette's masterpiece, it exhibits in a refined way its idea of elusiveness, really hard to decipher. A conceptually violent and subversive work from the title; ironic that being invisible to the "main public" at the same time supports and, in a certain way, confirms, the deepest cinematographic essence.

Two words : Bor. Ing.

[g61268-1 · 14 April 2015]

A young woman becomes interested in a play director after a paranoid, greasy-haired man tells her that the director will die soon, but can explain no more. She becomes an actor in his play and meets his strange friends, including his unpleasant girlfriend. She also learns that he longs for a certain musical recording on which another mysteriously doomed man played guitar. She meets more and more people and keeps asking questions, and finally . . .

I found this film completely vacuous. Vague talk of political conspiracies, assassinations, suicide, fascism, underground organizations, etc. without any ultimate clarity or purpose. A seemingly endless search for a missing tape recording that turns out not to be missing and which means nothing anyway. Characters have outbursts of emotion, but they feel false because nothing is ever really explained. And so on.. Basically a hundred forty one minutes of artistic masturbation. Spare yourself.

a nicely sustained feeling of threat throughout

[anxiousgayhorseonketamine · 8/10 · 23 March 2022]

.............. hmmmmmm many have written on this one and personally I see quite a different piece here

late 50s Paris. Moody. EMPTY. No cars about. Hilarious. Nobody seems at any point in all the exegesis you can find here and there to mention The Algerian War of Independence which was at the heart of French society in 1958 ; war in its fourth year out of 8 in total.

The OAS was planning to keep that colony AT ALL costs and many terrorist acts were committed. The threat which is NOT unarticulated in this piece or vague points to some perennial Nazi/Far Right threat of some sort ; what many in 2022 would term the NWO New World Order or Deep State and of course it was a reality then as it is today ... the interests of the very rich undercutting any type of true democracy .... hidden budgets interests spokes in the wheels of almost every aspects of society; once you're in ..... Juan dies then later Gérard were they suicides were they not?

In that respect this film and storyline are extremely prescient; you could make this film in 2022 and update it

The acting here is so-so never bad never rivet(t)ing (sic) the avant-garde score cutting in at times adds to the threat.

I do not really see this film as Nouvelle Vague more Nouvelle Vague-adjacent and for me although many worship him Rivette is never in the league of a Chabrol or God-Hard or for me the master Rohmer

But TOTALLY view this film for any student of the mood of 58 in France; it is simply distilled and bottled in this film ....