Paris Belongs to Us / Paris nous appartient (1961)
Paris Belongs to Us (1961)
DVDRip | AVI | 720 x 576 | XviD @ 1277 Kbps | 135 min | 1,41 Gb
Audio: French MP3 @ 128 Kbps | Subs: English hardcoded
Genre: Mystery
DVDRip | AVI | 720 x 576 | XviD @ 1277 Kbps | 135 min | 1,41 Gb
Audio: French MP3 @ 128 Kbps | Subs: English hardcoded
Genre: Mystery
Anne Goupil 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 theatre director who arrives with the mysterious woman Terry. The talk at the party is about the apparent suicide of their friend Juan, a Spanish activist who had recently broken up with Terry. Philip warns Anne that the forces that killed Juan will soon do the same to Gerard. Gerard is trying to rehearse Shakespeare's "Pericles", although he has no financial backing. Anne takes a part in the play to help Gerard, and to try to discover why Juan died.
IMDB
The Paris streets of Jacques Rivette's feature debut are the same glimpsed in À bout de Soufflé around the same time, yet they might as well be from Mabuse's Berlin – indeed, Rivette explicitly links his paranoia to Lang's late into the film by running a clip from Metropolis at a cinephile party. Among the guests is the young heroine (Betty Schneider), a student who, in between investigating an activist-guitarist's death and taking a role in a stage production of Shakespeare's Sophocles, can only ponder, "Am I going crazy, or is it the whole world?" "Both, kid," is her brother's (François Maistre) reply, and in the film's deliberately obscuring structure of muddying riddles, suicides, and vanishing citizens, that's as valid an answer as any. Are the warnings of the American writer (Daniel Crohem) real or ravings? Is the theatre director (Giani Esposito) in danger? What's with the dead man's fiancée (Françoise Prévost)? Who are "They"?
Ultimately, the film's thoroughly modern horror stems from the awareness of how much shakier the certainties of the world are than we think, and how vulnerable people are to them – the vagueness of Rivette's conspiracy-phobia looks back to Hiroshima and McCarthyism, and ahead to the ominous overview of Watergate-era American thrillers. Yet the fragility of order, where a malevolent cabal may or may not be watching your every move, is but one facet of the director's surveying of a world where the lines between reality and fantasy (or, more specifically, reality and theatre) have become scarcely less than blurred. Though not as popular as the maiden efforts of his Cahiers du Cinéma comrades-in-arms, and too schematic next to Rivette's later variations on the same themes, the movie remains a Nouvelle Vague launchpad (Truffaut helped finance it, Godard and Chabrol turn up in bits, and I'm pretty sure I spotted Jacques Demy somewhere). Even the rough transparency of the mise-en-scène, the amateurish bareness of its images, helps evoke the movie's melange of naturalism, melodrama, mysticism, and, above all, its sense of mystery.
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Paris Belongs to Us / Paris nous appartient (1961)
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