Cinema: Non: Paris Belongs to Us

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Paris Belongs to Us. "Of all the New Wave films, this is the most original and the richest." Such is the opinion of many French reviewers. Perhaps they are talking about some other movie. This one is the first full-length effort of a 34-year-old critic (Cahiers du Cinéma) named Jacques Rivette, and the best that can conscientiously be said for Director Rivette at this point is that he promises handsomely to do better next time.

"The whole world is in danger! Not just a few people but the whole world! It's the greatest conspiracy of all time!" What conspiracy? The heroine (Betty Schneider) does not know. She only knows what she has been told by a possibly paranoid American (Daniel Crohem): that a young man (Giani Esposito) she has just met is "next." The idea obsesses her. It sounds like a mischievous fiction, but suppose it isn't? And if it isn't, can she save the young man's life?

"Help me!" she begs the American. He smiles sadly. "You can't fight the Organization." But she has to try. She visits the young man's mistress (Françoise Prévost), visits the mistress of a man who may have been murdered by the Organization, visits a sinister intellectual who murmurs something prophetic about "une fatalité biologique." No clues from any of them. No real reason to believe that the young man is in danger. But suddenly one morning he is dead.

Whodunit? The hero himself? The American? The Organization? Does the Organization actually exist? Is it just a paranoid delusion? Is the film a study of psychic contagion? an attack on the creeping totalitarianism of modern life? an intricate exercise in confusion? Director Rivette has suggested the explanation he prefers. "My picture is the adventure of a theory—in turn proposed, set aside, revived, distorted, exhausted. The end cancels the original intention. Nothing has really taken place but the scenes themselves." How true.