AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN (aka 36 Vues Du Pic Saint Loup) is the latest, and possibly final, film from French director Jacques Rivette, one of the acknowledged masters of the French New Wave. This is a slight film from the veteran, and at a brief 85 minutes it is certainly his shortest. Its thin plot is set against the backdrop of a small traveling circus that is playing to empty houses. It stars Italian actor Sergio Castellitto as Vittorio, a man who stops and helps stranded motorist Kate (Jane Birkin), a performer who is rejoining the circus after a long absence. Vittorio follows the circus around from town to town for a week, and a tentative romance develops between him and Kate. As usual Rivette's film is a mix of comedy, drama, romance and the abstract musings on the mysteries of life, with minimal action and minimal dialogue, much of it obtuse and artificial. This poignant film deals with themes of grief, loss, regret and redemption, and it treats the world as a stage as Rivette uses this insular world of performers to hold up a mirror to our own lives. The mountain of the title is more of a metaphorical one. Rivette interrupts the personal drama with reprisals of an old-fashioned clown routine. The cast includes many regulars who have appeared in the director's previous films. Around A Small Mountain may be slight Rivette, but for admirers of this 81-yea-old director's unique style and his languorous pacing that will be more than enough to satisfy them. For others though this may prove to be a bit slow and dull.
4 Reviews
Charming and utterly captivating
howard.schumann16 October 2010
Feeling like a swan song, 82-year old French auteur Jacques Rivette's Around a Small Mountain is a charming and utterly captivating lament for the passing of time. At 84 minutes long, the shortest Rivette film to date, it evokes nostalgia for a bygone era of small traveling shows and circuses with their "posters peeling underneath last summer's morning glory vine," shows that relied on an intimate connection between performers and audience. Set in the Languedoc region of Southern France, the mountain in the original title is the Pic Saint Loup, but it can also be said to reflect the mountain that one woman must climb to be liberated from the stranglehold of the memories that have run her life.
The main form of entertainment in the mountain village is a single-tent circus performed to a sparse audience. Though Alexandre (André Marcon), one of the clowns says, "We're the last classics," but they refuse to rung the curtain down. As the film opens, Kate (Jane Birkin), a former circus performer, now a textile designer in Paris is stranded on a country road as her car breaks down. Her improbable but charming savior is an Italian traveler Vittorio (Sergio Castellitto) who bypasses her, then turns around and comes back to help. Without saying a word, he fixes her car and leaves without saying goodbye. Of course, the two are destined to meet again and it is at the circus in the nearby town that Kate is revisiting after an absence of fifteen years. Vittorio takes an interest in Kate and impulsively decides to rent a room above a café and attend the circus performance that evening.
At the show, Vittorio watches a routine, perhaps performed hundreds of times, that involves two clowns, a bunch of ordinary dinner plates, and a pistol. From the audience, Vittorio emits a burst of laughter, an unlikely event that startles even the performers. Although the antics of the clowns seem tired and outdated and much of the humor seems strained, there is still a certain magic in the performance that brings back the memory of days gone by. Gradually we learn that the circus was once owned by Kate's father and that she left fifteen years ago after her lover Antoine died in a tragic on-stage accident, an event that has been buried deep within her and one that she has been reluctant to confront.
Vittorio does not overtly convey any romantic intentions, yet he pursues his interest in Kate in a laid back, understated way. Though she is withholding and aloof, their relationship is sweet and their conversations very real. She states that she does not want to change because she has "gotten used to her pain," but softens as Vittorio tells her, "The dragons in your life are no more than princesses longing to be free." With the aid of the other circus performers that include Marlo (Jacques Bonnaffé), Kate's daughter Clémence, (Julie-Marie Parmentier), a trapeze artist, her niece Margot (Helene de Vallombreuse), Wilfrid (Tintin Orsoni) and Alexandre, Kate is assisted by her fiends to face her demons.
Though Around a Small Mountain is playful, it is also enigmatic as witness one sequence in which the actors emerge from a tent, then circle around to come out again, offering a phrase or moral directly to the camera, any of which could apply to the film. As we come to realize, the circus is like life, and, according to Vittorio, "the most dangerous place in the world", but Kate's willingness to come to terms with her fears make it also "the place where everything is possible."
The main form of entertainment in the mountain village is a single-tent circus performed to a sparse audience. Though Alexandre (André Marcon), one of the clowns says, "We're the last classics," but they refuse to rung the curtain down. As the film opens, Kate (Jane Birkin), a former circus performer, now a textile designer in Paris is stranded on a country road as her car breaks down. Her improbable but charming savior is an Italian traveler Vittorio (Sergio Castellitto) who bypasses her, then turns around and comes back to help. Without saying a word, he fixes her car and leaves without saying goodbye. Of course, the two are destined to meet again and it is at the circus in the nearby town that Kate is revisiting after an absence of fifteen years. Vittorio takes an interest in Kate and impulsively decides to rent a room above a café and attend the circus performance that evening.
At the show, Vittorio watches a routine, perhaps performed hundreds of times, that involves two clowns, a bunch of ordinary dinner plates, and a pistol. From the audience, Vittorio emits a burst of laughter, an unlikely event that startles even the performers. Although the antics of the clowns seem tired and outdated and much of the humor seems strained, there is still a certain magic in the performance that brings back the memory of days gone by. Gradually we learn that the circus was once owned by Kate's father and that she left fifteen years ago after her lover Antoine died in a tragic on-stage accident, an event that has been buried deep within her and one that she has been reluctant to confront.
Vittorio does not overtly convey any romantic intentions, yet he pursues his interest in Kate in a laid back, understated way. Though she is withholding and aloof, their relationship is sweet and their conversations very real. She states that she does not want to change because she has "gotten used to her pain," but softens as Vittorio tells her, "The dragons in your life are no more than princesses longing to be free." With the aid of the other circus performers that include Marlo (Jacques Bonnaffé), Kate's daughter Clémence, (Julie-Marie Parmentier), a trapeze artist, her niece Margot (Helene de Vallombreuse), Wilfrid (Tintin Orsoni) and Alexandre, Kate is assisted by her fiends to face her demons.
Though Around a Small Mountain is playful, it is also enigmatic as witness one sequence in which the actors emerge from a tent, then circle around to come out again, offering a phrase or moral directly to the camera, any of which could apply to the film. As we come to realize, the circus is like life, and, according to Vittorio, "the most dangerous place in the world", but Kate's willingness to come to terms with her fears make it also "the place where everything is possible."
Intervention and redemption in a traveling circus: a skeleton key to Rivette themes?
Chris Knipp28 September 2009
Warning: Spoilers
This is very short for a Rivette film, and its delineation of his themes is correspondingly clear, simple, skeletal -- suited to the simplicity of the little dying circus, whose director has himself recently died, and whose remaining members say this is its last tour. Castellitto's character encounters Birkin's on the road when the vehicle she's driving, which pulls the circus tent, has broken down. He arrives in a shiny German sports car like the deus ex machina that he is -- the present equivalent of Cocteau's motorcycles.
An essay by the French critic Hélène Frappat relates this to other Rivette films and analyzes its themes. This can be found on the Groupement Général des Cinémas de Recherche website and there is also a translation of the essay into English online. This provides a skeleton key to the skeleton key, so to speak.
Ms. Frappat doesn't mention it, but Vittorio (Castellitto) falls in love with Kate (Birkin) from then on, and yet, after lingering around the circus for a week or two, he is called on to business in Spain, and leaves her. By participating in a reenactment of the dangerous whip trick that had accidentally killed the most important person in her life 15 years earlier, Kate is purged of the lingering sorrow and guilt she has been feeling. She may not presumably return to her Paris occupation of dyeing cloth for designers. I tend to agree with 'Variety' reviewer Boyd Van Hoeij, that Jane Birkin's performance is more emotionally rich and her character is more rounded than Sergio Castellitto's. Castellitto is a versatile pro, and it's a bit surprising -- perhaps he's over-awed? -- that he doesn't endow Vittorio with more nuance. As Van Hoeij also notes, Rivette uses a lot of improvisation, and potentially the most fun are the clown "numbers", intentionally "threadbare" at the outset, then enriched at Vittorio's presumptuous suggestion in subsequent performances. The artificiality of the film is underlined by the fact that during the circus acts the audience is almost never seen.
The film may provide a kind of skeleton key to Rivette, as Castellitto's quoted remark suggests, and thus may specially appeal to students of his work. On the other hand, it lacks the richness of the director's preceding three films, the 2001 'Histoire de Marie et Julien'/'The Story of Marie and Julien,' the 2003 'Va savoir,' and the 2007 'Ne touchez pas la hache'/'The Duchess of Langeais.' But in its simplicity, clarity, and its sense of resolution, this is very much an enlightened artist's late work, and resembles Shakespeare's late Pastoral romances.
Nominated for the Golden Lion at Venice. Shown as a part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, 2009.
An essay by the French critic Hélène Frappat relates this to other Rivette films and analyzes its themes. This can be found on the Groupement Général des Cinémas de Recherche website and there is also a translation of the essay into English online. This provides a skeleton key to the skeleton key, so to speak.
Ms. Frappat doesn't mention it, but Vittorio (Castellitto) falls in love with Kate (Birkin) from then on, and yet, after lingering around the circus for a week or two, he is called on to business in Spain, and leaves her. By participating in a reenactment of the dangerous whip trick that had accidentally killed the most important person in her life 15 years earlier, Kate is purged of the lingering sorrow and guilt she has been feeling. She may not presumably return to her Paris occupation of dyeing cloth for designers. I tend to agree with 'Variety' reviewer Boyd Van Hoeij, that Jane Birkin's performance is more emotionally rich and her character is more rounded than Sergio Castellitto's. Castellitto is a versatile pro, and it's a bit surprising -- perhaps he's over-awed? -- that he doesn't endow Vittorio with more nuance. As Van Hoeij also notes, Rivette uses a lot of improvisation, and potentially the most fun are the clown "numbers", intentionally "threadbare" at the outset, then enriched at Vittorio's presumptuous suggestion in subsequent performances. The artificiality of the film is underlined by the fact that during the circus acts the audience is almost never seen.
The film may provide a kind of skeleton key to Rivette, as Castellitto's quoted remark suggests, and thus may specially appeal to students of his work. On the other hand, it lacks the richness of the director's preceding three films, the 2001 'Histoire de Marie et Julien'/'The Story of Marie and Julien,' the 2003 'Va savoir,' and the 2007 'Ne touchez pas la hache'/'The Duchess of Langeais.' But in its simplicity, clarity, and its sense of resolution, this is very much an enlightened artist's late work, and resembles Shakespeare's late Pastoral romances.
Nominated for the Golden Lion at Venice. Shown as a part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, 2009.
Jacques Rivette : French new wave master films zany art of describing small things of life.
FilmCriticLalitRao5 January 2010
If a sagacious spectator is allowed to put labels on various films and film directors,it can be said for sure that French film 36 Vues Du Pic Saint Loup / Around a small mountain would surely be labeled as a different kind of "bold Jacques Rivette" film.A small word of advice;one should not confuse the usage of the word "different" here as this film's differentness concerns the manner in which artistic creation is filmed by Rivette especially whimsically comical art of circus which has its own share of agony and ecstasy.It might also be possible that this appellation has something to do with the fact that Rivette has given an artistic dimension to human elements.It is true that this feature film by French new wave master Rivette is a short film if we were to consider other films which have been directed by him.However,its brief duration does not obstruct its inherent flow of suspense which does not remain a leap in the dark.This is precisely a special quality which gives attentive viewers ample chance in order to appreciate not only emotional game of its leading players Jane Birkin and Sergio Castellitto but also an opportunity to prick up one's ears as some of the most elegant dialogs need a pair of extremely attentive ears.Watching this film was a unique experience for film critic Lalit Rao as he sat with veteran Malayalam cinema actor Madhu (Saat Hindustani) during 14th International Film Festival of Kerala 2009
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