Paris nous appartient (1961)
Directed by Jacques Rivette

Film Review

It was in the summer of 1958, six months before the French New Wave fired its opening salvo with Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1959), that Jacques Rivette began shooting his first film, Paris nous appartient.  Not yet ready to give up his day job as a critic, Rivette worked on the film, on and off, for the next three years, treating it more as a hobby than a commercial enterprise.  He only managed to complete it with the financial support of his close colleagues on Les Cahiers du cinéma, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol.

By the time Rivette's film was finally released in France, towards the end of 1961, Truffaut and Chabrol had both made a number of films and had become leading figures of what had come to be known as the French New Wave.  But, already, the tide seemed to have turned.  Truffaut's Tirez sur le pianiste (1960) and Chabrol's Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) had been ill-received by critics and audiences, and Rivette's film arrived just when La Nouvelle Vague looked as if it had run its course.  Paris nous appartient came and went with virtually no one noticing.  It wasn't until he made his next film - the highly controversial La Religieuse (1966) - that Jacques Rivette established himself as a director.

It is a curious thing that the least commercially successful of the French New Wave directors, and the one who found it most difficult to get started, should be the one who remained most true to the spirit of the Nouvelle Vague throughout his career.  Paris nous appartient isn't so much a thoughtfully conceived piece of cinema as a template for the kind of films that Truffaut, Chabrol, Godard and Rivette would put their names to at the start of their careers - and you could legitimately describe it as the most Nouvelle Vague film of them all. 

It's a nebulous, dawdling, frustrating mess of a film, low in plot but positively awash with the kind of blatant intellectual navel-gazing that only the New Wave directors could pass off as high art.  It is because Rivette made the film so cheaply that it looks like it does, with all the characteristics (good and bad) that we associate with La Nouvelle Vague.  Lacking the polish of contemporary commercial films, it can hardly help feeling more strongly evocative of the era in which it was made.  Truffaut's Les 400 coups (1959), Chabrol's Les Bonnes femmes (1960) and Godard's À bout de souffle (1960) all look as if they may have been strongly influenced by this film - in ways that are both obvious and subtle.  Rivette may have been late reaching the cinema, but it's a fair bet that he originated the look and feel of the French New Wave.

Rivette's dissatisfaction with Paris nous appartient may well explain why he reworked much of the content of this film in two later (far better) works - L'Amour fou (1969) and Out 1 (1971).  Far longer these two films may be (mindbogglingly so in the case of Out 1), but they have a coherence and solidity that Rivette's first feature manifestly lacks.  Paris nous appartient looks like a Frankenstein documentarist's insane attempt to combine two seemingly incompatible genres: the city symphony - exemplified by Alberto Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures (1926) - and the trashy political thriller.  An ordinary-looking girl named Anne (played by a winsome Betty Schneider, in her last but one screen role) wanders around Paris, seemingly on a quest to find a missing audio tape, and becomes embroiled in a murderous intrigue which may or may not be part of an international conspiracy.  Along the way, she gets roped into a beatnik production of Pericles and falls in with a totally paranoiac writer who covers his bedroom wall with Pac-Man-like doodles.  It sounds like the kind of scenario a bored teenager would scribble in the back of an exercise book.

Paris nous appartient never looks like a film that was planned to happen. Rather, it looks like some neglected plant that just kept on growing, sending tendrils out in every direction.  It is a random walk across the geographical and cultural landscape of Paris in the late 1950s, its own haphazard production humorously mirrored by the chaotic production of the stage play within the film.  The film's patchwork feel (the result of its piecemeal production) gives it an unreal, almost dreamlike quality, which jars with the almost documentary-style of filming that Rivette employs throughout, shooting scenes in natural light in real locations around the capital, most likely with the cast improvising a fair chunk of their lines.

The film's darkly oppressive tone (which comes in part from an ominous percussive score but also manifests itself in the lighting and camera angles) is far more redolent of 1950s America than 1960s France.  In place of the juvenile optimism and playfulness that we find in the early films of Rivette's New Wave contemporaries, there is an unremitting sense of gloom and paranoia.  Rivette picks up on the first glimmerings of youth alienation, a deeply rooted mistrust of authority and institutions that would fester in France throughout the 1960s, culminating in the public protests of 1968 that would bring to an end the De Gaulle presidency.  This is not something we notice in the early films of Truffaut, Chabrol and Godard. Rivette was setting the agenda - the others merely followed.

Paris nous appartient anticipates both the film noir claustrophobia of Godard's later Alphaville (1965) and bitter melancholy of Truffaut's La Peau douce (1964) (not to mention Chabrol's now reviled espionage thrillers).  It does have a few lighter moments (including a humorous aside with Jean-Luc Godard flirting with another customer in a pavement café), but it is the film's overarching aura of grimness that prevails.  Even the title has a dark sense of irony about it.  Who exactly does 'nous' refer to - the forward-thinking post-war generation who intend claiming France for themselves, or some shady consortium of establishment string-pullers that seeks to control the masses for their own ends?   In truth it belongs to no one.  The city that Rivette captures in his film is one that needs no master and is unlikely ever to submit to one.  It is a living entity in its own right, tolerant of the human parasite that crawls all over its skin but never subservient to it.  To quote Péguy (as the film does, at the end of the opening credits): Paris belongs to no one.

Film Synopsis

Paris, June 1957.  Anne Goupil, a student from the provinces, is half-heartedly revising for her exams when she finds herself drawn into an intrigue revolving around the death of a Spanish musician named Juan.  Terry, the dead man's mistress, is satisfied that Juan committed suicide, but Philip Kaufman, an American writer driven from his homeland by the McCarthy witch-hunts, is convinced his death was politically motivated.  Anne then meets Gérard Lenz, a struggling theatre director who is rehearsing a shoestring production of Shakespeare's Pericles.  It was whilst composing music for this play that Juan died in mysterious circumstances.  Gérard offers Anne a part in the play and she gladly accepts.  Looking increasingly paranoid, Philip does his utmost to convince Anne that Juan was murdered - or at least driven to suicide - on discovering an international plot.  Terry is also aware of the plot and if she lets Gérard in on the secret he is sure to be the next victim...