This is a wonderful film of intrigue; with an unusual layer of mystery, depth, and beauty. The actors act well, but on a different psychology than most films. Also a play within a play. Bravo Rivette

Jacques Rivette's first film, made at the start of the French New Wave movement, is the kind of French film that's normally parodied in American media. The characters in Paris Belongs to Us are intellectuals with theatrical deliveries, the women cold and inexpressive, the men on the opposite end of the spectrum. In this case, the setting IS, at least partially, the world of theater, and a trouble French production of Shakespeare's Pericles - a play that's largely unstageable. Perhaps Rivette was commenting on his own Freshman attempt. To me, the film is really about Cold War-era intellectual paranoia, where bourgeois artists talk like revolutionaries, at the risk of getting nabbed or killed by the State. And while art can certainly prove subversive, it feels rather satirical to say so here. They say just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you. But maybe they really aren't. Betty Schneider is Anne Goupil, a kind of participating witness to the conspiratorial melodrama, her fruitless investigations kind of like the "art" made (or attempted) by other characters. Rivette would go on to better things, but that's not to say this isn't a legitimately well-made picture. It's just that, decades on, it does feel of its time, and not so much of ours.

So that's why my screenplay never got made! It's a conspiracy! A conspiracy of conformity!