Cebalord Very best movie i ever watch

Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Greg A young woman becomes interested in a play director after a paranoid, greasy-haired man tells her that the director will die soon, but can explain no more. She becomes an actor in his play and meets his strange friends, including his unpleasant girlfriend. She also learns that he longs for a certain musical recording on which another mysteriously doomed man played guitar. She meets more and more people and keeps asking questions, and finally . . .I found this film completely vacuous. Vague talk of political conspiracies, assassinations, suicide, fascism, underground organizations, etc. without any ultimate clarity or purpose. A seemingly endless search for a missing tape recording that turns out not to be missing and which means nothing anyway. Characters have outbursts of emotion, but they feel false because nothing is ever really explained. And so on.. Basically a hundred forty one minutes of artistic masturbation. Spare yourself.

chaos-rampant We have a rather intimidating tappestry here at first sight, about a web of Parisian lives connected to each other and informed by a bunch of nested references. To a mysterious suicide and a missing sound tape, to a staging of a Shakespeare play as mirror of the film we are watching, to shadowy conspiracies supposedly pulling the strings of what we see from a higher, unseen level.So we have a film-within, as often with Nouvelle Vague, but also a film without. Or better yet, the film we are watching as devised by unseen minds above shaping its world. Bridged by actors (and non-actors) who act parts knowingly or unknowingly, who may be chess pawns moved in turn by other pawns. The idea is that eventually we never get to find out how much of what we saw was this game and whether or not the game was imagined or masking a sinister plot.So far so good, a complex film in which to superimpose the various grids. Yet at the same time not so complex after all, rather obvious in how it handles us the various keys.For example; describing the play he's staging, the director says that he welcomes the challenge of bringing order to the convoluted mesh of different roles, that the world of the play is chaotic but not absurd. Does anyone have doubts that we're watching a surrogate Rivette describe the film? Then the stuff about conspiracies. The idea is of course that they may or may not be true, yet in getting there we are treated with naive politics about money ruling the world, a policed, monitored world.In the finale we get some rather interesting insinuations about where the mind conspiring for answers in the face of an uncertain world leads us. When anything is imagined to be possibly true, nothing is.The one notion that holds some actual power in all this, is precisely the one that is not explicit. A film noir plot elusively unraveling in the background of so much distraction, about a mistress and her ex-lover arranging murders as suicides. Why, to what end, again open ends. We may or may not imagine this, but this ambiguity is ours.We would later find in the films of David Lynch and Raoul Ruiz all this situated back in the imaginative mind, where all our fanciful storytelling begins and where the illusionary images (bent by desire) we use to represent reality are born. In more cinematic ways, more fluid. This maintains the appearance of an ordinary world, it's talky, and the camera is not adventurous. It's never really dangerous, except until too late, or passionately engaged in its codas.But one of the places this mode begins is here, in nascent form. Earlier yet, it was film noir, which the film references and even innovates in an important way, ingenious for its time (by making the noir plot the vague inference, and the karmic forces of noir the explicit reference and actively recognized by the characters). Although it often appeared clearcut and about a simple crime, it was riskier stuff in the right hands.(A few more words on this: with noir we view a threatening cityscape where cast upon it are shadows of the mind, illusions of desire about a woman or money which in turn distort what is perceived of reality. With the post-noir landscapes (such as in Lynch), we experience instead the world of the mind - now the shadows are inverted, they're pieces of reality which seep back as filmic devices, which the mind arranges into a movie plot that sustains the illusion! This is for me one of the most fascinating journeys available in cinema, from Shangai to Inland Empire, and Rivette's film may not have refined as much but it's an important link in the transition.)

Christos Dimitrakakis (olethrosdc) This is an unusual film. It revolves around a group of characters that are slightly connected to each other through their artistic tendencies and/or political beliefs. The group is presented well - it is quite realistic, even though it is so colourful. This is perhaps because the criteria for being part of the group are so 'normal'. Friends, people with similar interests.. acquaintance networks - this is something that is presented very well in the film.A sinister undercurent pervades the whole movie: a background plot that is never revealed, or shown directly - it is something that the characters speak to each other about and make reference to. While in other movies the conspiracy plot would have been the central theme, here it is pushed into the background, delegated to a simple object of discussion - the movie instead revolves around the lives of the characters and in particular, the protagonist's, from whose point of view the situation is seen. By bringing the focus onto the characters and their daily lives, illusions and aspirations, the movie manages to to breathe fresh life into what would have otherwise been just another conspiracy film.A few technical things: The acting is not very consistent. The parisian scenes were very good and the photography was aesthetically pleasing. The music enhanced the atmosphere significantly, though some of its psychedelic overtowns were a bit overpowering at points (making the dialogue hard to follow - if the intention was to transfer the confusion/paranoia to the viewer, it was appropriate, however).It's not a masterpiece, but it is definitely interesting and worth watching at least once.

trakl If you like David Lynch's films, you might enjoy "Paris nous appartient". After having seen it, I still did not know what it was really about. This film develops an atmosphere of sheer mystery, which will never be solved completely. On the other hand, it also touches the political situation of the 50s. The overall existence of conspiracy is very appealing, as is the innocent character of Anne. Music and camerawork are very unusual, the latter making the film rank among the best of the European New Wave.9 out of 10.