Paris Belongs to Us at Criticker.com (2025)

1961

Mystery

2h 0m

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Interesting affair that, in most cases, you will either love for it's inconsistent plot structure or hate for the very same reason. The atmosphere Rivette creates quite fascinating, but it ends up tripping itself due to the lack of structure.

The threat is too ill-defined to give the paranoia any weight. It has the effect of making everyone seem self-involved and a little silly.

This is what Truffaut would have made if he had the playfulness of Antonioni. It was kind of interesting at first until I realized what a boring character Anne was. There was still some great dialogue and editing, but it was few and far between. Towards the end I was checking the time quite often.

A very odd and indeed disconcerting blend of political paranoia, existential angst, romantic entanglement, theatrical allusion, cinematic inventiveness and urban nightmare. Much like life.

contains most of rivette's usual concerns, those of plays and puzzles, and spices it up with a dash of political conspiracy. i didn't enjoy this as much as his others though. it wasn't very coherent, it definitely felt like a debut feature, and its aesthetic was closer to chabrol than later rivette, with an uninteresting modernist soundtrack backing bland black-and-white photography. not bad, but even though rivette is my favourite cahiers critic, his debut is the least good of the lot.

I love this film. This 2 1/2 tour of bohemian mid-50's Paris takes the form of a conspiracy thriller without ever landing on the specifics of the threat. It's ultimately more about the mood of Cold War dissent and the free-floating anxiety and paranoia of feeling that the entire world is against you. Schneider is quite good as the fairly blank, audience surrogate who takes you on a tour of the film's cramped apartments, rundown rehearsal halls and some of the worst parties committed to film.

Sublime - best film of the nouvelle vague. Rivette has a disturbing sensibility about him and this, his first film, is his best. Brilliance from beginning to end.

Post-WWII existential procedural mystery. A surreal ride from the very first minute -- Jean's sister shouting to Anne that everyone will die after his alleged suicided. Anne just goes on obsessed with this spanish musician's tragic ending, both a tormented genius/paranoid conspiracionist plotting against supposed neo-fascist worldwide organization. She's fond of theater director Gérard, the very man who seems to be 'next in line'. Everything seems as fantastic as real, as fabricated as natural.

Watch Les trottoirs de Saturne instead.

While this is less impressive than the other Rivette films I've seen – it’s unnecessarily disjointed and Schneider is miscast as Anne - it is here that Rivette establishes the key themes of his life on/as film; theatre (preparing for plays that will never be 'performed'), surveillance (linking with paranoia) and riddles (as an accompaniment to theatre and surveillance). I realise watching this film that central to Rivett's brilliance as a filmmaker is his use of colour, obviously absent here

Young angst and Hitchcockian motif are equally apocalyptic, each containing the specter of a world that seems to conspire against us. A compelling pastiche, bohemian and modern and suspenseful, but perhaps a bit overlong and, like all Macguffins, full of hot air.

Just because you're paranoid... is the french title a pun? And Pericles?

Dare I say the most impressive debut of the nouvelle vague?

The mysterious conspiracy of The Conformist meets the dark, wandering existentialism of Antonioni and the streetwise photography of Breathless, making this a strange and haunting French version of the milieu that would populate Italian cinema for the next decade. "Courage drains from us, like water from a hand. Nothing can be done."

Rivette, Soğuk Savaş döneminin paranoyalarını, bohem Paris gençliğinin hamuruna, Yeni Dalga'nın atmosferini ve imkanlarını kullanarak karıştırıyor. Başka birşey söylememe gerek var mı?

"Rivette was perhaps more of a prognosticator than he realized, anticipating the downfall of the very movement he was involved in before it had effectively begun." - Keith Uhlich

Hated the ending.

Rivette's debut is typical French New Wave in both matter and form. It deals with young Parisian bohemians working in theater and worried about politics (an imagined government conspiracy, not the reality in Algeria heavens forbid). The photography and editing are playful, mostly in an annoying and hopeless bid to liven up the overwrought, boring and humorless text. The plot is meandering and directionless. The cast has much shoddy acting but features cameos from all the Cahiers auteurs.

The mysterious paranoia that pervades the film is very well executed, though at times it'd be nice if it were a little more focused. Rivette is experimenting with a lot of visual styles and soundtrack choices and, while they give the film an eclectic feel, for the most part they fit the mood well.