Critics reviews

Love lives intertwine, and drama leaks out like ignitable propane, but mostly the almost 2.5-hour dream-saga is a comatose nightmare in which a deadened sense of paranoia envelops you without anyone saying a single explicit thing to suggest it.

The performances are without filigree, and there can be a sameness of tone and delivery that makes all the characters blend together. Just compare the rehearsal scenes in Out 1 to those in Paris Belongs to Us to see how the shift in how much he put his faith in his performers. Paris Belongs to Us is more fascinating for its complicated blocking, in which characters re-orient themselves in the frame so the focal point keeps shifting.

There's a quiet madness to the way the film transforms Paris into a labyrinth, both geographically and spiritually. Thanks to the gorgeous new transfer on the Criterion Collection's new release of the film, it's possible to better appreciate the refined aesthetic and unique texture of Rivette's brilliantly composed and constructed debut.

To a great extent, the film's opening provides the map key for following Rivette's impossibly complex labyrinth of character names, hallways, bedrooms, hotels, and city streets, almost none of which are signposted within a clear cartographic scheme. That is, one must embrace, not resist, contradiction in order to understand its functionality as the guiding logic of urban existence.

Paris Belongs to Us might be seen as [Rivette's] thesis film, a brilliantly accomplished résumé of all that he has learned from his teachers (Rossellini, Mizoguchi, Hitchcock, Lang, among others), along with an understated announcement of the new directions in which he intends to set off in the future. However unlucky the circumstances of its release may have been, Paris Belongs to Us ultimately earned him his wings.

Rivette started making movies before most of his peers, but took his time developing his style, which would eventually make him the most actor-centric filmmaker to come out of a movement that made directors into icons and introduced "auteur" into the cultural conversation. But in its mixture of Cold War paranoia and bohemian portraiture, Paris Belongs To Us remains unique: A movie that is at once "of its time," and doesn't seem to belong anywhere except in the place it creates within itself.

Regardless of whether the threat Anne is investigating comes from without or within—and, ultimately, the distinction seems impossible to make—you feel acutely just how precarious all of this is. In its sense of ambient peril thickening around the free creative endeavor, Paris Belongs to Us is an immensely troubling film. Watching it again, I found myself remembering its recently deceased director—but also thinking of Chantal Akerman.

It's as much Hitchcock as Lang—that is, the Hitchcock of the uber-Rivettean Rope and Under Capricorn, where objects and décor alike trade with the pacing characters, oscillating between foreground and background, as part of the ever-shifting, plastic, three-dimensional dramaturgy—and something few others have explored as thoroughly, or exploited as miraculously, since.

At once an urban morality play and a work of meta-cinematic interrogation, Rivette's debut captures a city in the throes of transition as the past stubbornly yields to the demands of an evermore metropolitan modernity.

Rivette's tightly wound images turn the ornate architecture of Paris into a labyrinth of intimate entanglements and apocalyptic menace; he evokes the fearsome mysteries beneath the surface of life and the enticing illusions that its masterminds, whether human or divine, create.

Always thought this was a case of youthful hi-jinks, based on the title and New Wave credentials, but it turns out to be a prototype for Rivette's abiding interest in obscure cabalistic conspiracies and Performance as its own kind of truth ("Theatre is not illusion, it's reality," warns our hero - the reality of the actor acting). It's also a weaving, unfussily strange film with a wide-eyed quality and a kind of apocalyptic morbidity coursing beneath a deliberately flat surface.

The pace is slow and reflective, and the consistent, jarring currents of global conspiracy in this otherwise-recognizable underground of writers, students, and aesthetes reminds the viewer just how equally conspiratorial even the most conventional Hollywood B-movie plots could be, with their molls, murderers, and mad scientists. Highly recommended to anyone interested in observing cinéphiles becoming cinéastes.