Quien sabe...

This is an interesting, yet at times boring movie. It is not boring necessarily because you get bored while watching, but it's because you don't get attached to any of the characters for a long time. There are two stories going on. They are intertwined. The story of the play that we don't understand much about, except seeing the possible alterego of our main woman character and also of course there is the story of these six individuals, three men and three women. They are all in search of something literally or symbolically.

While watching this film, you might pause, have some dinner, go back, continue. The phone rings, you forget about it, start watching again, and fall asleep. The next morning, you wake up, decide to watch, you think of looking it up at IMDb and you just do that. Throughout the film, there is a huge amount of feeling going back and forth, but we all (together with the director, the movie cast and the crew) watch it all happen as if it's not even happening. In a way, the movie is too French-cool, which also makes it unique. This attachment I am talking about, because of its non-existence, you might just end up finishing the film in three days, but maybe the more crucial thing is that no matter what, you do wanna go back and see what's haunting you. You can't let go. In a way, that's exactly what the main character feels. She can't let go either. There is something calm about her, something serene. We are not impressed at first, but slowly she becomes a goddess of determination and genuineness. Yet, there is something that triggers her mind and it steals her peace.

Luckily as time goes on, we observe her internal-peace-movement. In this sense, this movie is either very successful and it gave me the exact feeling, or maybe I am overly empathetic : )

It did take me 3 days to watch, with numerous interruptions of daily life, and I even stopped watching now and started writing this review.

Yes, I do not know the ending yet. Do watch it, if you are someone who does a lot of thinking about the complexities of interpersonal relationships (especially about romantic ones), but make sure you are patient, interested, and ready to think.

The play within a play ploy is used in Go Figure to excellent effect. The play is an eighteenth century farce performed by an Italian acting troupe visiting Paris. The farce utilizes six characters, the optimal number to engage in romantic mix-ups, flirtations, and other amorous stuff. And lo and behold, Go Figure itself contains six persons who engage in romantic mix-ups, flirtations, and crimes, both physical and of the heart.

There's the lead actress and her stage manager husband; she, who walked out on her now married ex-lover, whom she meets for the first time in three years (as well as his wife). Rounding out the six are two siblings, one a sexy young lady, the other her caddish older brother. There's jewel theft, a hunt for a missing manuscript, jealousy, and the falling in and out of love. And in the backdrop the acting troupe struggles to remains solvent.

All this is served up in, what I would call a French style. Of course I've not seen that many French romantic comedies, but I can state that were this in the hands of an American 'Hollywood' director it would be an entirely different film. And probably not nearly as good. In Rivette's hands all the action and interactions seem natural and light. There's no 'look at me' style of acting; it's almost understated. And this makes for a very enjoyable viewing that loses little on the small screen.

Some years ago Sophie Marceau explained her move to Hollywood in more or less the following terms: I am tired of doing the same French movies where all in all there is a love triangle and in the end the three of them have dinner together. Well, Va savoir is exactly that kind of movie. It is more complicated because there are actually four love triangles, but yes, they all have a cake to share in the end; all the six people who were involved in the triangles. So nothing new here. The good thing, however, are the characters. Except for the brother-and-sister duo who are kind of stereotypical and possibly present the spectator with the cliché of male and female libertine Parisians, the other two couples arouse our curiosity with their insufficiencies: Camille is a little too absent-minded to be completely sane, Pierre is a typical academic dork who falls into furies of sophisticated frustration, Ugo visibly carries the burden of his unattractive appearance and compensates for it with his thick Italian accent, while Sonia obstinately tries to keep to the level of those intellectual pricks and prove how much more she knows about real life. This is a good melodrama if you like the genre. I do, and I liked it. Marceau probably wouldn't.

The only time I felt anything for one of the characters here was near the beginning, when Camille, the lead actor in a Parisian production of a Pirandello play, a French woman speaking in Italian, has trouble remembering her lines (she is pre-occupied by a past love affair which had taken place in that city). The rest of the time I was either mildly amused, or just bored. It is hard to find empathy with a group who seem to be as artificial off the stage as they are on it. There are some nice moments, especially when Ugo fends off temptation from the lovely Dominique, and the duel scene between Ugo and the prat of a philosopher who was once his partner Camille's lover, but the whole thing takes far too long (2 hours 20 minutes), lacks tension and above all calls for minimal involvement on the part of the viewer.

It's rather interesting that Ugo is searching for an unpublished 18th century play. If theatre is to avoid being relegated to museums, producers need either to put on new stuff, or at least to present old material in an innovative way. Ugo seems to regard the past as more important than the future (a pointer, perhaps to the age of the director here).

The atmosphere here reminded me of `Amelie'. Both films have popped up at various film festivals around the world as examples of current French film production. If they are typical, then you might think the French film industry is headed for irrelevancy, but the Marseilles films of Robert Guediguian fortunately suggest otherwise.

I was bored to death by this movie. The main character is a self-centered and selfish actress whose problems failed to interest me. I stayed with it for an hour, and walked away; my wife said it became somewhat better toward the end. If all drama must be divided into comedy and tragedy, then in that sense this is a comedy. However, when movie reviewers call a movie a comedy, I think we are entitled to believe they mean it is funny. Tastes differ, and I accept that some might find this movie interesting, but by no stretch of the imagination could anyone in his right mind call it "funny." I wouldn't have rented this video except for a quotation on the box, in which A. O. Scott of The New York Times wrote, "An especially rich and subtle farce . . . resolved with the verve and precision of classic screwball comedy."