36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup (2009) - film review

Just as a small circus company is about to begin its summer season, its owner suddenly dies.  To save their jobs, the circus troupe contacts Kate, the eldest daughter of their former boss, and plead with her to take her father’s place.  To everyone’s surprise, Kate accepts and agrees to drop everything to resume the life that she abandoned many years ago.  On the way, Kate meets an Italian named Vittorio, who, fascinated by the circus life, asks if he can accompany her.  He is intrigued to know just what made Kate give up the circus and why she is so keen to return to her old life...

After the darkly existential chamber piece Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003) and the brooding Balzac adaptation Ne touchez pas la hache (2007), Jacques Rivette’s latest cinematic offering is a considerably lighter affair, a thinly sketched but nonetheless moving little romantic drama set in the world of the travelling circus.  Although the film has far less substance than we have come to expect from this still highly regarded relic of the French New Wave (it is in fact Rivette’s shortest feature to date), it does have a subtle poignancy and charm that make it one of the director’s most humane and perceptive films.

Here Rivette is reunited with Jane Birkin, the outlandish sixties sex symbol who was once considered Britain’s answer to Brigitte Bardot (and still is in some quarters).  Birkin had previously featured in Rivette’s memorable masterpiece La Belle noiseuse (1991) and, remarkably, scarcely looks a day older in this film.  Here she is cast opposite Sergio Castellitto, the charismatic Italian actor who starred in Rivette’s Va savoir (2001).  Birkin and Castellitto are two of a kind, sympathetic actors who both speak with thick accents that do not allow us to forget their country of birth.  They each play a character who appears to be living in exile, prevented from finding his or her identity by a deep-seated reluctance to confront a troubled past.   She is the reluctant manager of a lacklustre theatrical troupe, he is the drifter.  Both are steeped in mystery which the other feels compelled to unravel, with the inevitable result that they fall in love.  Despite the slightness of the screenplay, Birkin and Castellitto both turn in a compelling performance and succeed in making their characters harrowingly believable.

36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup offers a simple tale, simply told, melancholy and humour woven into a gentle fable of love lost and love regained.  The main characters’ search for identity and purpose is reflected in the circus’s faltering attempt to find an audience as it makes its haphazard way along the highways and byways of France’s achingly beautiful Languedoc region.  The potent circus motif serves two functions: to connect the protagonists with their past and help resurrect the spirits of past lovers, and to remind us that our lives, for all their apparent complexity, are really no more than brief circus acts.  In making this film, the eighty-year old Rivette is perhaps acknowledging that his time in the ring is almost over, that it will soon be time for him to take his bow and let other acts take his place.  All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players...

© James Travers 2010

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