Around a Small Mountain (Thursday, July 22, 2010) (80)

I have written before about how much I've liked some of the new work by great French New Wave directors. That Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette are still working in their 70s and 80 is amazing by itself. Around a Small Mountain, sadly is not a wonderful film and suggests to me that Rivette might be on the way to losing his chops. It's wildly elliptical, with such a dull story that even if the narrative was clearer, it wouldn't even be that interesting.

One day Jane Birkin, Kate, is stuck on the side of the road with her SUV not running. A rich Italian man, Vittorio, pulls his Porsche up next to her and silently fixes her engine. He then drives off without any comment. She is pulling a circus tent as she works for a small troupe of clowns, acrobats and strongmen that plays through the the South of France. The Italian falls in with the circus, befriending the players in an effort to win Kate's heart.

Throughout the film, Rivette cuts several times to weird Brechtian sequences where the actors speak directly to us in the audience or have these weird mini-plays (on a stage with dramatic lighting) explaining background secondary stories. All of these seem like a bit much, as the whole film is so small, a good percentage of it becomes these meta-stories. They just didn't work for me.

I guess the story is rather sweet, if totally banal. The Italian man is rather lost in life, we have to imagine (though we find out almost nothing about him, really), and he feels safe and at home in the circus with other lost souls. I think my main objection is that the story never really develops very much. None of the characters grow or change and the fact that the story focuses on these particular scenes and days comes off as rather random. There is no real sense of forward movement or any kind of inertia.

It is clear that Rivette is a master. The Brechtian bits alone are daring and interesting (and I give all sorts of credit to any filmmaker who breaks rules). I just wanted a bit more. More of a story, more analysis of the characters, more of a conclusion. The film sorta ends with a silly open question that doesn't really go anywhere and this is frustrating more than thought-provoking.

Stars: 1.5 of 4