Around a Small Mountain

Around a Small Mountain(2009)
Director: Jacques Rivette
Country: France / Italy
Runtime: 84


Around a small mountain casts a “novel, unprecedented, never seen before” light on Jacques Rivette's oeuvre. The quote is from Vittorio (Sergio Castellitto), a new, Italian incarnation of themysterious character of guide/savior/intercessor whose mission, since Va savoir, consists in releasing a princess from her spell—in other words, her past or her grief.Iis gracious, princess, inconsolably mourning her late love by a graveside (like JohnWayne talking to his departed wife in SheWore A Yellow Ribbon) is Jane Birkin. Having played the ingénue in L'Amour par terre and the great painter's former model in La Belle Noiseuse, Jane Birkin strips bare, in Around a smallmountain, the enigma of all Rivette's heroines: confined behind the bars of the Rue de Rivoli in Paris in a moment of distraction snatched from the film's Cevennes mountains, she brings to mind Anna Karina, imprisoned in a convent in La Religieuse; haunted by a mistake she didn't make, her heart aches like Sandrine Bonnaire's in Secret Défense ; madly in love with a ghost, like Pauline (Bulle Ogier) in Out 1, she moves like a tightrope walker in a halfway state between life and death, similar to the coma from which Louise (Marianne Denicourt) emerges at the start of Haut Bas Fragile. Yet Around a small mountain introduces an unprecedented space-time,which changes the rules of the game: the circus.Despite appearances, the circus isn't an extension of the theatre by other means.