Rating: 
Summary: Cosmopolitan Love Makings
Review: "Va Savoir" is work of a master. The plot may be characterized as thin but take a look at the skill in which Rivette moves from one coupling to another. There's a hint of magic and mystery to the proceedings. Clocking at nearly three hours, the movie is an enchanted tour of love, desire, and the performances of everyday life.
Rating:
Summary: At last! The best movie of 2001.
Review: 'Va Savoir' opens with a voice in the darkness asking for lights to be turned on a stage, and the entire film can be seen as a play or a celebration of play, of acting, role-playng, creating, stories, plots. the two lead characters are actors, and in their forking narratives, bring everyone they come in contact with into their theatrical orbit. Camille is the French lead actress with an Italian touring company who are performing Pirandello's 'As You Desire Me' (the story of the amnesiac mistress of a writer who treats her like one of his creations, filmed by Hollywood with Garbo (another Camille) and Stroheim) in Paris to general indifference. During her hours off, she seeks the lover she dumped three years previously, a sheepish philosophy professsor now living with a domineering ballet teacher. her co-star and company director Ugo, whose precise relation to Camille we don't learn until near the end, spends his days searching for an unpublished, possibly apocryphal play by his 18th century compatriot Goldoni. this paper chase leads him to the beautiful student Do, whose mother's library may hold the key, and who is instantly smitten by the older man. her brother is used to pilfering valuable books to fund his gambling habit. these two plots, intercut with apparent crudeness early on, begin to interweave to comical, romantic and magical effect, distending its mysteries and crime narrative, collapsing into a farce of dizzyingly shifting relationships and a vertiginous mock duel. 'Va Savoir' creates an enchanted world that looks superficially like ours, but operates on completely alien principles. Jacques Rivette is one of cinema's great fabulists, but he doesn't depend for his fantasy on special effects or the literally supernatural. Every scene, even the long excerpts from the play, are filmed with plausibility and an air-brushed realism. It is in plot development that Rivette's fantasy lies. having begun the film with rehearsals for a drama, Rivette proliferates confusions between reality and illusion. there isn't a single sequence in the entire film that doesn't have characters walking down corridors, streets or paths, or walking into rooms, but these everyday events are transformed, corridors become labyrinths or secret passageways, rooms become magic chambers or dungeons, rooftops the plains of undiscovered planets. People dreaming becoming creating authors, mirrors portals to another dimension. The emphasis is on characters seeking to affirm their identity, but continually transforming, metamorphosing, renegotiating. Allusions abound, as often distracting the viewer as enlightening the theme. 'Va Savoir' plays like 'Celine and Julie go boating' (Rivette's most famous film) updated, with the theatre as haunted house, caretakers Camille and Ugo releasing all kinds of ghosts from the past. it is also similar to Bergman movies like 'the Face' or 'Fanny and alexander', their plot-displaced climaxes extended over an entire film. If Rivette has decided to charm his audience rather than challenge it, it is somehow appropriate that in this age of infantile, no-attention-span cinema, the most adventurous, enjoyable and youthful film in years is made by a 73 year old.
Rating: 
Summary: "... as many pregnant pauses as bon mots"
Review: Although billed as a romantic comedy, Jacques Rivettes' relatively terse 1990 film "Va Savoir" ("Who Knows?") focuses on the priority of obsession over romance. At a few critical junctures, the tension breaks and we are allowed a nervous laugh before it resumes. I found the whole drama oddly compelling. This is much the same reaction as I had to "The Venus Beauty Institute". And "Va Savoir" is every bit as pointless. Its two and a half hour running time allows for as many pregnant pauses as bon mots. I neither liked nor understood any of the characters, who were alternatively morose and manic. Their introversion evokes the claustrophobic feeling of the staged play within a play, Luigi Pirandello's "As You Desire Me". The plot involves an actress Camille (Jeanne Balibar), who is returning to her native Paris after three years in the Italian theatre company directed by her Italian lover Ugo (Sergio Castellitto). She becomes re-acquainted with her previous lover in Paris, a Heidegger-obsessed professor of philosophy (Jacques Bonaffe), who is living in their former apartment with an ex-con ballet-teaching feng-shui practicing lover Sonia (Marianne Basler). Meanwhile, Ugo seeks out a manuscript to a lost play, crossing the path of a literature student/ingenue Do (Helene de Fougerolles), in one of the the most photogenic libraries encountered since "A Name of the Rose". Do's mysterious, ladies man of a brother Arthur (Bruno Todeschini) becomes involved shortly thereafter. The rest of the movie sees the various characters face off alone (yes, they're all deeply conflicted, even with themselves), one on one, or in groups. All the loose ends are summarily tied up or discarded in a grand finale on stage, a contrivance on a par with the Marx Brothers' "Coconuts". (Note: I watched this with English subtitles and I speak neither French nor Italian.)
Rating:
Summary: "... as many pregnant pauses as bon mots"
Review: Although billed as a romantic comedy, Jacques Rivettes' relatively terse 1990 film "Va Savoir" ("Who Knows?") focuses on the priority of obsession over romance. At a few critical junctures, the tension breaks and we are allowed a nervous laugh before it resumes. I found the whole drama oddly compelling. This is much the same reaction as I had to "The Venus Beauty Institute". And "Va Savoir" is every bit as pointless. Its two and a half hour running time allows for as many pregnant pauses as bon mots. I neither liked nor understood any of the characters, who were alternatively morose and manic. Their introversion evokes the claustrophobic feeling of the staged play within a play, Luigi Pirandello's "As You Desire Me". The plot involves an actress Camille (Jeanne Balibar), who is returning to her native Paris after three years in the Italian theatre company directed by her Italian lover Ugo (Sergio Castellitto). She becomes re-acquainted with her previous lover in Paris, a Heidegger-obsessed professor of philosophy (Jacques Bonaffe), who is living in their former apartment with an ex-con ballet-teaching feng-shui practicing lover Sonia (Marianne Basler). Meanwhile, Ugo seeks out a manuscript to a lost play, crossing the path of a literature student/ingenue Do (Helene de Fougerolles), in one of the the most photogenic libraries encountered since "A Name of the Rose". Do's mysterious, ladies man of a brother Arthur (Bruno Todeschini) becomes involved shortly thereafter. The rest of the movie sees the various characters face off alone (yes, they're all deeply conflicted, even with themselves), one on one, or in groups. All the loose ends are summarily tied up or discarded in a grand finale on stage, a contrivance on a par with the Marx Brothers' "Coconuts". (Note: I watched this with English subtitles and I speak neither French nor Italian.)
Rating: 
Summary: Eh, not so great...
Review: As an avid fan of foreign films, I was looking forward to this film because of the reviews posted and the description of the movie. Much to my disappointment, I've added this movie to my "Prevent others from the same misery" list. The plotline to this movie is too thin if not virtually nonexistent. It follows the same pace as an episode of Sesame Street. Watching a golf game on TV is more thrilling. The main problem I had with this movie was the writing and characters. I can enjoy a movie with a thin plot if it's somewhat entertaining and I care about the characters, but this movie lacks both of those things. I'm not criticizing anyone's acting ability because I cannot fault them on that. They did the best they could with the material, but from the start of this movie, I did not care about the outcome of anything. I'm sure it did not help watching this shortly after seeing Amelie, which also had a thin plot, but was entertaining (even bizarre at moments) nonetheless. I'm just thankful I watched this at home and could take breaks from the sheer boredom of it. I hope this has helped at least one person save 2 hours and 34 minutes of their life, which unfortunately I shall never recapture.
Rating:
Summary: The Most Boring Movie I've Ever Had To Sit Through!
Review: I cannot recommend this movie at all. I know it's gotten mostly positive reviews but my date and I both wanted to leave after an hour - unfortunately we didn't know each other's wishes until after the movie was over. Even the opening credits were boring and took for ever not to mention the fact that the movie is over 2h30m long. Blech. Perhaps we were spoiled with the previous week's delightful Amelie but even so... Va Savoir is way too pretentious, way to flat and unemotional - a nihilist's lament has more emotion than this movie. I like movies about nothing but this wasn't even a movie. As we walked out of the theater, we saw a man fast asleep and I thought to myself that he made much better use of his time than we did.
Rating:
Summary: come tu mi vuoi
Review: I found this movie thoroughly enjoyable. The story line is simple and, in some way, rather unimportant - Camille, a well-known Parisian actress, is returning from Rome to act in front of her home audience in a play directed by her new lover Ugo. The play is Pirandello's Come Tu Mi Vuoi, a classical work (written for his lover Martha Abba) about a woman pinned between the yin and yang forces of reality and illusion. Throughout the film Rivette switches his camera between the play and Camille and Ugo's "reality" as if to ask us who are the real Camille and Ugo. What do they really want? What makes them tick? Can I, the spectator, enter their scriptless universe? Rivette (and his excellent actors) show us that delicateness can be robust and inventive, that desire for another can never be fulfilled and yet that the fulfillment does not really matter, because in the process of the struggle to achieve it we become alive and creative. What matters is style; style is substance. We are also treated to a brilliant depiction of the incestuous relationship between the Italians and the French and there is a delicious succession of nuances, hints and plays with the national stereotypes that brought many a smile to my face. I can see why some - those used to Hollywood cliches with their happy endings and oh so predictable plots - might not find the movie to be that hot. Well, that's just too bad....
Rating:
Summary: come tu mi vuoi
Review: I found this movie thoroughly enjoyable. The story line is simple and, in some way, rather unimportant - Camille, a well-known Parisian actress, is returning from Rome to act in front of her home audience in a play directed by her new lover Ugo. The play is Pirandello's Come Tu Mi Vuoi, a classical work (written for his lover Martha Abba) about a woman pinned between the yin and yang forces of reality and illusion. Throughout the film Rivette switches his camera between the play and Camille and Ugo's "reality" as if to ask us who are the real Camille and Ugo. What do they really want? What makes them tick? Can I, the spectator, enter their scriptless universe? Rivette (and his excellent actors) show us that delicateness can be robust and inventive, that desire for another can never be fulfilled and yet that the fulfillment does not really matter, because in the process of the struggle to achieve it we become alive and creative. What matters is style; style is substance. We are also treated to a brilliant depiction of the incestuous relationship between the Italians and the French and there is a delicious succession of nuances, hints and plays with the national stereotypes that brought many a smile to my face. I can see why some - those used to Hollywood cliches with their happy endings and oh so predictable plots - might not find the movie to be that hot. Well, that's just too bad....
Rating:
Summary: absolutely beautiful and brilliant
Review: I had to write a review after seeing some of the reviews already given. I guess it comes down to if you can appreciate beauty, and can appreciate just that. This is a very long film, and throughout the whole of it there are no explosions or guns, or heroes etc. Simply a beautiful and idyllic feast for the eyes of France and romance.
Rating: 
Summary: va savoir... who knows or go figure?
Review: I have one criterion for judging movies: Good ones, like good music, good food, and good sex get better the more you do them.I didn't say perfect. But then there has never been a perfect film or a perfect anything created by a human being, has there? "Va Savoir," an idiom which I would rather translate into "go figure" rather than the parenthetical "who knows?" you find in every reference to this French version of a modern Shakepearean comedy where all the knots and tangles created by human ineptitude and benevolent chance are harmoniously resolved by the final act, is a good film. I've seen it three times and have enjoyed each viewing for different reasons.
One is the language. I should say languages. Please see the undubbed version so you can hear the sonorous prosody of Italian contrasted with the tubular perscussiveness of French spoken by the bilingual cast.
I like everyone's face.Every one is natural.
There's nothing gross about the way love and affection are expressed.It's subtle and funny. The music doesn't get in the way.
It has a happy ending.
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