Paris is ours

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Paris is ours (original title: Paris nous appartient ) is a 1961 film by Jacques Rivette .

Movie
German title Paris is ours
Original title Paris nous appartient
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 1961
length 140 minutes
Rod
Director Jacques Rivette
script Jacques Rivette, Jean Gruault
production Les Films du Carrosse, AJYM
music Philippe Arthuys
camera Charles Bitsch
cut Denise de Casabianca
occupation

action

June 1957. Anne recently moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. In her small attic room she is reading Shakespeare's The Tempest when she hears her neighbor sobbing from the next room. She walks over and the young woman is excited and distraught about the death of her brother Juan. He had been murdered and he would not be the last, all his friends were also threatened.

In a café, Anne meets her brother Pierre, who persuades her to accompany him and his girlfriend to a party that evening at the painter Bernard's. The name of another main character in the film comes up: Philip Kauffman, a US journalist who got into trouble with the McCarthy Committee.

Also at the party, where everyone with the exception of Anne seem to know each other, the main topic of conversation is the death of Juan - some suspect that it was suicide, others that he was murdered. Irritated atmosphere. Personal rivalries. Anne has seen and heard enough, and when she has decided to go, a couple comes towards her. Pierre explains: "Gérard Lenz and Terry, a former lover of Juan."

Gérard Lenz is a theater director and with a small group of loyal followers he wants to bring Shakespeare's seldom performed play Pericles onto the stage. Through her friend Jean-Marc, whom she still knows from her hometown, Anne finds access to this theater group and takes on the role of Marina.

Theater rehearsals. - Gerard's conversation with Anne about Pericles . He mentions that Juan wrote guitar music for the group. But the tape had disappeared. - Philips madness of a global plot. - And between them all: the opaque Terry.

Anne goes in search of the tape recording, speaks with Juan's former lover and with a certain Dr. de Georges, also one who had high hopes for Terry. Anne's search remains unsuccessful until she later hears the music in Terry's apartment.

De Georges is someone who appears to have great financial resources. From criminal machinations? In any case, Anne's brother Pierre says that he has already done “the annoying little work” for him.

Is it de Georges who ensured that even the Théâtre de la cité now wants to put on Gérard's Perikles production? - But Anne no longer fits into the ensemble in this context.

Gérard, just still enthusiastic about the new possibilities, throws the staging down. A letter for help to Anne, which he immediately denies again. He is found dead. And again the question: suicide or murder? Murdered by Pierre? Because he confesses to Anne on the phone that he has done something very bad.

The final scenes of the film. A single house, somewhere in the Banlieu. Some, not everything, is cleared up:

There's a letter from Juan's sister. His death had been a Falange murder.

Gérard has committed suicide, cornered by de Georges.

And Pierre? Terry killed him on the way from Paris to the Banlieu Pierre. But it hit the wrong person, actually she should have killed de Georges, because he pulled all the strings.

And the big plot, the secret organization? "Only existed in Philips head," says Terry. "It's so easy to explain everything with a single idea."

Locations

The film historian Roland-François Lack has compiled an almost complete list of all locations. A small selection:

  • The train ride of the opening credits, in which the credits are displayed, ends at the Gare d'Austerlitz .
  • Anne and Jean-Marc meet for lunch on the Place de la Sorbonne . After the wait in front of a Resto-U (restaurant universitaire) is too long, they decide to leave it with a baguette. They take it on a bench on Place Saint Sulpice .
  • Gérard and Anne talk about Pericles on the Pont des Arts .
  • The last rehearsals before the failure of Gérard's Perikles project take place first in the attic and then on the stage of the Théâtre de la Ville, then Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt. (Théâtre de la cité, as it is called by Gérard, was an older name of the same theater.) - Probably the most famous setting of the film, which was also used for the movie poster, was taken on the roof of this theater. From there, Gérard can see Anne coming up from the metro station to Place du Châtelet .

Varia

  • In François Truffaut's film Les quatre cents coups ( They kissed and they hit him ), the Doinel family - Antoine, his mother Gilberte and his stepfather Julien - went to the cinema together, in the Gaumont Palace. If you believe Antoine's mother, Paris nous appartient is shown there. - The scene was shot in December 1958. At the time, Rivette's film was still being shot and, due to financial problems, it dragged on for years, so that Paris nous appartient didn't premiere until three years later, in December 1961 would have. And not in the large Gaumont Palace, but in the small studio of the Ursulines.
  • The actors, in cameo appearances, are three Nouvelle Vague directors who are friends : Claude Chabrol (as a guest at the painter Bernard's party, where Rivette himself is sitting around), Jean-Luc Godard (as a man on the café terrace who Anne gives another useless tip about who might be in possession of the tape you are looking for, a certain Tania Fédine) and Jacques Demy (who just turns up there, at that Tania Fédine, with baguette and beer - “La Slavia”, just kidding).
  • Once there is a private screening of the Babel scene from Fritz Lang's Metropolis at de Georges , at which Anne and her brother are present.

DVD

2011: Published by Kinowelt / KulturSPIEGEL / ArtHaus. (French original version with German subtitles.)

literature

  • Frieda Grafe , the future has long since begun . Originally published in: Program booklet of the Neue Filmkunst Walter Kirchner distributor, Göttingen, February 1968. Republished in: Schriften, Volume 9, Film für Film , pp. 78–81. Brinkmann & Bose Verlag, Berlin 2006. ISBN 3-922660-95-9 .
  • Herbert Linder, Paris is ours . Originally published in: Filmkritik from May 1967. Republished in: Rolf Aurich and Wolfgang Jacobsen (editors), Herbert Linder - film critic , edition text + kritik, January 2013. ISBN 978-3869162683 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Roland-François Lack: Paris nous appartient: Reading Without a Map . First published in: Australian Journal of French Studies , Vol. 47, 2010. Republished in: thecinetourist . However, he does not consider a cartographic reading of the film to be sensible.
  2. ↑ Antoine de Baecque, Serge Toubiana: François Truffaut , p. 262 and p. 300. Gallimard / folio, Paris 2004. ISBN 2-07-041818-9 .