These flat and arid two and a half hours -- a slow build to a silly end -- are pretty compact for Jacques Rivette, the septuagenarian French director whose record for a single movie stands at thirteen hours. They are nonetheless sufficiently diffuse and undisciplined for any other director. Nice Parisian locales. Nice performances by Jeanne Balibar, Sergio Castellitto, and (a slim miss of almost Rohmer-esque charm) Hélène De Fougerolles; and it's nice to see the erstwhile sex kitten Catherine Rouvel as the cake-making mother of the last-named. Nice sound, above all -- sharp, spare, wonderfully alert to footfalls and squeaky floors. But this seems faint praise for an egghead romantic comedy of deliberate artifice and contrivance, one that dishes out extensive excerpts of Pirandello's As You Desire Me, one that pursues a literary treasure hunt for an unpublished play by the 18th-century Italian dramatist Carlo Goldoni (shades of Henry James's The Aspern Papers), one that self-consciously plays the theater-vs.-life game. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd
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