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Va Savoir

Va Savoir

List Price: $29.95
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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: My favorite movie of 2001
Review: When I saw "Va Savoir" in theaters, I loved it so much that I stayed in my seat for the next showing (with the film's lethargic 154-min running time, that's around 5 hours or so) and I enjoyed every second of it. I just love the characters in this film. The way they talk, the dialogue, the situations and places they find themselves in, all of it magical. I do not understand people saying the film is enjoyable, but not heavy or a "major Rivette", which I wholeheartedly disagree with (I find this to be Rivette's best work since "La Belle Noiseuse"). I have seen the film around 6 or 7 times and have yet to tire of it. For anyone looking for a charming, intelligent, hugely entertaining, and romantic movie...this is it. Highly recommended.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Translation: "B-O-R-I-N-G"
Review: When I saw Va Savoir in a local arthouse, it had been nowhere near the top of my must-see list. But what could it hurt, I wondered innocently, before spending the better part of my evening bored out of my skull by this maddeningly inaccessible, narcissistic, confused mess of a film. This is the kind of movie that once gave foreign films a very bad name abroad.

Things have improved vastly in the past decade; for every Va Savoir, there are now a handful of genuinely appealing, comprehensible international releases such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Run Lola Run, Happenstance or Amelie. But this film recalls the days when a foreign film was supposed to be like math homework, a joyless, arid, purely intellectual exercise. We all believed the less you understood about any work of art, and the more you suffered in consuming it, the more deep and meaningful it must be. And so we sweated to decipher that which owed its mystique-- if not indeed its existence-- to its status as a thing incomprehensible.

Chalk it up to post-modernism, modern cynicism, or the plain endemic weariness of the planet, but I don't know many people who feel that way these days. Life is too short to seek self-exile within a seemingly pointless puzzle. There are to be sure worse things than wasting your evening watching an unsatisfying film. But still, I urge you to avoid making the same mistake I did. Va Savoir is a totally unrewarding, meandering, frustrating experience. --Oh, and did I leave out "unfunny"? My Marienbad.


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