When do we get to hear about the new Rivette? I'm dying here!

I understand. But it screened for the press just a few hours ago and premieres tonight, which is why you haven't heard anything about it yet.

I'll go ahead and give you my letter grade before commenting later, when my head clears: B+, with a qualification: this is not one to be seen while experiencing recurrent waves of festival fatigue. Several members of the esteemed press corps didn't last through the 2 hours and 17 minutes, and many who didn't leave could be heard snoring throughout the theater. But for those of us pumped up on caffeine, a film that looked difficult at first becomes delightful and then, towards the end, quite suspenseful.

Hear, hear! The Rivette would be at least a B+ in my book, too... and yeah, it was a little unsettling to see so many walkouts in the screening upstairs from where David caught it.

I'm still digesting what the uninitiated wouldn't necessarily grasp from Rivette (I'm working on a theory that both marries the film and proclaims it a narrative antithesis to the equally Balzac-infused "Out 1"), but what some must have dismissed as a dry-as-stale-toast period piece had some of the meatiest, most complex relationship dynamics between two onscreen characters I've seen since I can't remember when. And that primary-colored cinematography! That choreographed dance of words and bodies! That amplified ambient sound!

Minor Rivette is still a major work, indeed, but I'll have to write about this when I've had more time to think it through (and I'm not so bleary-eyed from the rest of the fest).

Thanks so much for the feedback, guys!

On the whole, the work from Rivette's "late period" (meaning roughly Up, Down, Fragile to the present) seems to have cooled the ardor of even his more devoted followers (Rosenbaum especially). This downgrading apparently stems from Rivette's perceived abandonment of what Saul Austerlitz calls "the subversion and complication of film narrative" represented by his earlier films.

Aaron's wonderful comments regarding the new film's "choreographed dance of words and bodies" seem quite applicable to Rivette's last two films as well; all of which makes me wonder if perhaps we shouldn't be examining the current phase of Rivette's output from a fresh angle, leaving aside (momentarily, at least) questions of narrative accessibility & duration.

Plus isn't there a four hour director's cut of
Va Savoir as yet unreleased on video?