Va Savoir

Well, occasionally you do come a cross a foreign film that isn’t a gem of non-Hollywood storytelling. Well, more often than occasionally, actually, but you see my point.

Here this convoluted and complex plot of storylines interweaving and winding about each other just create chaos rather than charisma. It goes a little something like this (I think): Camille returns to France with Ugo after three years abroad. She meets her old flame Pierre and their spark is still there. Meanwhile, Ugo searches for a play and meets Do, who promptly falls in love with him. She has a brother, Arthur, a shady character who used to date Sonia, a dance teacher. She wears a priceless ring he is after, while she is worried about her relationship with her husband Pierre whose old flame Camille is back from abroad…

There’s a little more regarding subplots and such, but you get the idea. It’s a busy film with plenty of sexual tension thrown in, although only garnering itself a PG rating. While the acting is fine, the script truly doesn’t demand much from the performers in this French/Italian talkie from 2001. Having so much chatter and so little action of any sort, the 148 minutes of this production truly begins to drag 15 minutes before the second hour is up.

I’m also getting pretty tired of this ‘captive universe’ theme where there doesn’t seem to be another person in the whole world but the characters in the story. And, naturally, their lives all must intersect in this six-person world. For any film to be taken seriously in this day and age, it must be realised that this doesn’t occur in reality, however films from all nations are constantly using this ongoing theme of sub-reality. It was swell when it first came out, but the swelling’s gone down now.

This is a fairly good transfer with no real artefacts to speak of. The colour palette is surprisingly drab for such an attempted upbeat film with the costuming making these characters almost disappear into the background. Colours are even if dull, while blacks are true and shadow detail is only moderately good. We get to see the whole French thing in the cinema aspect ratio of 1.85:1 with anamorphocity stretching the pic for the widescreeners.

Well, the dialogue seems to be clearly enough spoken, though I only picked out three or four English words in the whole thing. If you speak French or Italian you’ll do fine though. The English subtitles seem to say what’s going on, and they keep up well with the dialogue. Music is your usual minor romantic comedy style with chirpy accordion and whimsical accordion filling the more chipper scenes, plus deep accordion for the dramatic bits. Notable, but hardly memorable. Dolby Digital 2.0 does the honours here and being not much but a talkie, this works just fine.

There’s quite a few here of note with the first being an interview with Jeanne Balibar, who talks about her film role while seated in a French café for 8:15.

The Co-Writers Discuss Va Savoir is next and features (you guessed it) the screenwriters Pascal Bonitzar and Christine Laurent. This goes for 43 minutes and runs into the interminable by the end. There’s plenty of footage included and it almost plays like a disjointed and dismembered audio commentary. Worth a look, but prepare to fast-forward the long, long strips of film footage.

Then there’s the French and US trailers, which of course are both very different. The US version only features bits that don’t have any dialogue, as usual, in trying to trick people into visiting the cinema to see this subtitled film. The poor Yanks. They can’t read.

Five filmographies for the major cast and the director follow and finally a photo gallery holds eight stills and behind the scenes shots.

For those interested in meandering foreign cinema this will please, but for anyone who has trouble with foreign cinema, this one will only re-affirm your feelings. It’s a sluggish story that takes far too long to become interesting enough to hold the attention, and by this stage we’re kinda over caring. There’s not even much to redeem the film visually, with drab costuming and limited outdoor shots of the French scenery.

If you’re a diehard, this’ll be fine, but for anyone else, there are far better foreign films available to fill your annual quota.