Paris Belongs to Us (Paris Nous Appartient) (Alym Films, Les Films de Carrosse, filmed 1958, released 1961)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I ran Charles and I a film I’d just got on Blu-Ray from the Criterion Collection, a movie I’d been curious about since David Thomson profiled it in his book Movie Man half a century ago: Paris Nous Appartient, directed by Jacques Rivette in a four-year period from 1957 (when he and his collaborator Jean Gruault wrote the script) to 1958 (when it was shot) to 1959 (when he finally raised enough money for his post-production) to 1961 (after a two-year struggle to find a distributor). The disc we were watching gave the title as Paris Belongs to Us, a literal translation of the French original, though apparently the first English-subtitled release came out as Paris Is Ours. The film begins with a quote from a French writer named Peguy, “Paris belongs to no one,” and both the quote and the title are ironic because the people in this movie are about as far away from any centers of power as you can imagine. The central character is Anne Goupil (Betty Schneider), who’s attending college in Paris and majoring in literature with a special emphasis on Shakespeare (which tied this movie in to the last two big films we’d watched, the video of Ambroise Thomas’s opera of Hamlet and Laurence Olivier’s adaptation of the original play). In an early scene she’s actually shown reading aloud from The Tempest in the English original – “Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea change/Into something rich and strange.” I wonder if that quote was selected because Alfred Hitchcock used it as the title of his 1931 film Rich and Strange – the movie I consider Hitchcock’s first masterpiece and a work of technical and emotional subtlety he would not match until he got to Hollywood and made Rebecca in 1940 – because Rivette was one of those directors, like François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, who had got their start as film critics for the magazine Cahiers du Cinema and Hitchcock was one of the Cahiers favorites.

Alas, while Truffaut and Godard became star directors with their first films, The 400 Blows and Breathless, respectively, Rivette didn’t, I suspect largely because The 400 Blows and Breathless were tightly plotted, coherent stories while Paris Belongs to Us is a series of nearly random incidents and is constructed in such a way that we’re constantly being thrown situations that look like normal movie clichés – only Rivette and Gruault keep throwing curve balls at us and confounding our expectations. Anne begins the movie by moving into an oddly oval-shaped building in Paris full of pretentious intellectual wanna-bes (most of the people in this film are in their early 20’s and I find myself nostalgically reminiscing about what I had been like at that age – indeed, I suspect how you respond to this film will depend a lot on how old you are when you first see it and how close you are, or ever were, to living the lifestyle it depicts). Her brother Pierre (François Maistre) is also living in Paris and she reconnects with him. She also makes other friends among her fellow tenants and learns of an amateur play director named Gérard Lenz (Giani Esposito), who is putting on a production of Shakespeare’s play Pericles, Prince of Tyre. The play was obviously chosen because of the enigma surrounding it and its true authorship; it came relatively late in Shakespeare’s career (1607) and it was quite likely a collaboration.

I looked up the Wikipedia page on Pericles, which describes it as “a Jacobean play written at least in part by William Shakespeare and included in modern editions of his collected works despite questions over its authorship.” The consensus view seems to be that a man named George Wilkins, described on Wikipedia as a “victualler, panderer, dramatist and pamphleteer,” wrote the first two acts and Shakespeare the last three. Wilkins also published what would now be called a “novelization” of the play as a book, and he (or whoever) constructed an audacious opening scene David Thomson cited in connection with this film and suggested was part of the reason Rivette and Gruault used it in their script. Pericles, prince of Tyre, comes to Antioch to seek the hand of the daughter of King Antiochus. Like Prince Calaf in Turandot (which made me wonder if Carlo Gozzi, author of the source story for Turandot, had cribbed this device from Shakespeare and/or Wilkins), in order to marry the woman Pericles has to guess the answer to a riddle (just one, not three), and if he gets it wrong he will be killed. Pericles correctly guesses the riddle – it indicates that Antiochus, like Noah Cross in Chinatown, has had an incestuous relationship with his daughter and fathered her child – but realizes that if he gives the correct answer Antiochus will have him put to death for revealing his secret, while if he gives a wrong answer Antiochus will put him to death for missing it. So he takes the one course open to him and flees.

Pericles is sufficiently marginal in the Shakespeare canon that it was not included in the First Folio – though it was one of six plays added to a later edition of the Third Folio (and more recent scholars have admitted another play to the Shakespeare canon, The Two Noble Kinsmen, adapted from Chaucer and credited as a collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher). Rivette seems to have picked this play precisely because of its marginal status and also because it has a “search” narrative (Pericles ultimately marries someone else and has a daughter with her, only at different times both women disappear in ways that make Pericles presume they’re dead, though they turn up and reunite with him at the end), and in certain ways the whole cycle of death and searching for the dead is central to the plot of this film. Also, when one of the characters describes Pericles as a series of disconnected incidents and a lack of structural coherence that’s worth putting on because it has many powerful individual scenes, that could be a capsule description of this movie too. Anna learns that one member of the circle, Juan (whom we never see as a living character except in a brief silent scene that apparently represents a flashback), fled Spain because of his opposition to the Franco dictatorship and later committed suicide – only not everyone who knew him thinks it was a suicide, and Anna, like the central character of a more normal movie, decides to play amateur detective and seek out the truth about Juan’s death.

She also joins the cast of Gérard’s Pericles production after the actress he cast as Pericles’ daughter Marina leaves it to do some paid work. One of the recurring themes in the film is Gérard’s difficulty in keeping his cast together because they’re constantly dropping out to do films, commercials or other jobs that will bring them income – and in a story turn that might reflect Rivette’s own difficulties in getting his film made, at one point Gérard sells the rights to his production to an established theatre, only they insist that he fire Anna and bring in an experienced actress, and the cast members he’s forced to use go all diva on him. They’re backed up by the show’s producer, and ultimately Gérard quits and the producer takes over as director. One of the film’s MacGuffins is a tape of a guitar solo, recorded by Juan just days before his death, which Juan intended as background music for Gérard’s production – only no one can find it. Anna takes it on herself to trace it, only to discover it in an obvious place (some of her friends are actually playing it when she walks in on them) and realize that the tape isn’t a clue to the mystery of Juan’s death at all. The film ends in the French countryside, where the characters confront each other – by then Gérard has sent a note to Anna saying that if she doesn’t call him by midnight he’ll kill himself, only she doesn’t get the note until 12:20 a.m. She finds Gérard’s door locked and fears the worst, only he’s not dead – he’s just in bed with another woman (for a French movie this film is singularly short on l’amour – though the characters have described themselves as being in shifting relationships, this is the first time we’ve seen hard evidence of that), and when Anna confronts Gérard with the other woman on the street, he says indignantly that he would never write such a stupid note. Then he is found dead just a day later.

The ending is as random as the rest of the movie and as revelatory of Rivette’s attitude towards his characters – it’s the sort of movie (like some of Woody Allen’s later films) in which you get the impression that if you see it again it would all turn out differently; these people aren’t emotionally attached to each other and their loyalties shift like seismograph readings during the Big One. Paris Belongs to Us is the sort of movie you can enjoy (I enjoyed it, anyway) even though you wouldn’t want all films to be like it; it manages to incorporate politics and paranoia about politics in ways as creatively loopy as the rest of it – thanks mostly to the character of Philip Kaufman (Daniel Crohem), a former Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent and novelist whose career was destroyed by McCarthy-era blacklisting, and when one of the characters protests that McCarthy is dead he says, “But his spirit lives on.” (Boy, does it ever.) Philip is convinced that the whole world is run by a sinister secret organization aimed at dominating everything and crushing all dissent; later some of the other characters tell him he’s wrong and there isn’t just one grand conspiracy but a whole bunch of little ones that all have the same purpose: to make themselves richer and more powerful at the expense of everyone else.

There’s a fascinating discussion about the changing forms of fascism – in a film made just 17 years after the Nazis occupied Paris and much of France, and just 13 years after the occupation ended – which was fascinating to hear after the hosts and guests on MS-NBC had been discussing whether to use the F-word to describe former President Trump’s movement and the way the Republican Party is systematically passing laws to rlg elections to make their power permanent. The politics in Paris Belongs to Us have a kind of then-fashionable armchair Leftism about them, a sense that the world has gone horribly wrong under the international reach of capitalism but also that it’s useless to try to change it and any attempts at activism will literally get you killed – which is one of the scenarios we’re given to explain Juan’s death (that he was knocked off by an agent of Franco’s government to keep him from returning to Spain and joining the internal resistance). Paris Belongs to Us is an endlessly fascinating movie, frustrating in the number of loose ends it leaves while at the same time reminding us that real life is nothing but loose ends; most human stories don’t involve nice, neat story arcs, climaxes and definitive endings.