36 vues du Pic Saint Loup (Around a small mountain)

  

The French New Wave is still swinging, though perhaps at a slower speed.  Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, and Jacques Rivette, legendary filmmakers that met as film critics, are now over eighty.  Yet retirement is out of the picture, as each continues to produce and direct feature films, recovering New Wave sensibility and charm that has only grown slightly less innovative with time.  In his latest feature, the mature Rivette focuses on middle-age romance. 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup is an atypical rom-com, starring Jane Birkin, (an actress best remembered for being Serge Gainsbourg’s wife, and inspiring a large Hermès purse) and Sergio Castellitto, the charismatic Italian actor, who also starred in Rivette’s Va Savoir.

Those familiar with Rivette’s work will not be surprised at the emphasis on theater, that this time appears in a circus scenario. Kate (Jane Birkin) is newly reunited with a small circus troop that she once abandoned after her lover, a fellow performer, was killed accidentally in the whip act. Now, traumatized, she stays on the outskirts of the tent during badly attended performances in the south of France.  Kate’s chance meeting with Vittorio (Sergio Castellitto), a mysterious well-dressed man with an Italian accent, inspires hope for new love. However, her fear dominates as he becomes more flirtatious and obsessive in his pursuit.  

Despite the centrality of the Vittorio/Kate romance, real sparks never fly.  Although Vittorio’s smiles and wit compel the audience, he fails to charm Kate out of her forlorn ambivalence.  The actors’ lack the chemistry necessary for screen-love, and thus the audience turns their anticipation towards an engaging comedic subplot surrounding Vittorio’s turn as a clown. As this is a Rivette film rather than a true travelling circus, elements of absurd theater reign in an abstract tent performance (Waiting for Godot is an obvious reference).

36 vues du Pic Saint Loup is Rivette at his most playful.  Miles apart from his last film, La Duchesse de Langeais, a historical melodrama based on a Balzac short story, 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup remains light-hearted even when characters discuss the transient nature of life—due in large part to the comedic skills of Sergio Castellitto and André Marcon. New Wave themes pose questions to the audience on the nature of cinema and its relationship to theater: characters speak to the camera and quote Godard, (“All of our dragons are really princesses waiting for us to free them.”) The magnificent provençal landscape behind the delicate dialogue and troop acting make this feature a true pleasure. Although, Charlotte Gainsbourg has now surpassed her mother in acting and celebrity, Birkin pulls off the grieving lover’s paradox with a widow’s experience.  While 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup is not at the caliber of Rivette’s  most lauded work, Céline et Julie vont en Bateau (1974), both films invite the audience to escape with their characters into an alternate imaginary world.

Comments

[Dorothy]

Just fyi... Jane Birkin has a full musical and acting career of her own. It developed at the same time as Serge Gainsbourg's but that is not the reason why she is so well known in France. It felt important to correct that. Gender politics and all.

[Nicole]

right dorothy. I should have mentioned that she is best known in the US for these reasons and for "Je t'aime...moi non plus." I am not French though so you might no more about her celebrity in France. I should have also mentioned that she starred in Rivette's "La Belle Noiseuse" and was excellent.