Paris Belongs to Us (1961) (2024)

Popular reviews

• Review by theriverjordan ★★★½ 26

  “Paris Belongs to Us,” the first full length work by Jacques Rivette, is an answer key to much of the director’s later filmography. It is, though, an answer written in a riddle of its own.

  “Paris” runs in the same early circle of Nouvelle Vague entries that verged somewhere between neorealism and melodrama. Similar to Chabrol’s “Le Beau Serge,” Truffaut’s “400 Blows,” and Rohmer’s “Sign of the Lion,” the film pulls only rudimentary elements from what the movement would become, focusing instead on a glimpse of life on the streets of the city. There is a reason each of these early Nouvelle Vague touchstones had a flavor of Italy to them: Roberto Rossellini.

  The neorealism icon incited a project to…

• Review by Peter Labuza ★★★★ 8

  Godard took Fuller and Bogart; Rivette brings Hitchco*ck and Welles (and perhaps a little Ulmer) to this debut film. Like other Rivettes I’ve seen, there’s excess abound and the narrative meanders through scenes, where location is way more important than plot (the director standing on the roof overlooking Paris feels like the great shot of Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success). But this is an apocalyptic conspiracy film through and through, led by a naïve girl navigating a very dangerous space. Opening scene sets the stage with the Hitchco*ck-styled camera movements and the neighbor screaming about how everyone is doomed. Anne’s interest in running down these mysterious tapes is classic MacGuffin, as she finds herself literally transforming into an…

• Review by boss cow 2

  “Rule Number One: Secrecy”
  The Structure of Conspiracy in the Films of Jacques Rivette

  Perhaps it is some sort of conspiracy that Jacques Rivette is frequently written out of histories of the French New Wave? Despite being a part of the Right Bank crew next to the likes of Jean Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and Francois Truffaut (who all have cameos in Rivette's early films, including Coup du berger [1956] and Paris Belongs to Us [1961]), and not only acting as a writer at Cahiers du Cinema but also as its chief editor, Rivette is often left out of academic discussions of the French New Wave.1 Douglas Morrey proposes in his work, “Secrets and Lies, How Not To Write About…

• Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 9

  we are the conspiracy we have been waiting for -- every society's a stage, every citizen a player, every person a sleeping god -- all united by performative esotericism; the secret is out in the open, we only have to see it in daily life. rivette's potent admixture of langian paranoia, feuilladian weird realism and hitchco*ckian obsession bring the cinema the closest it's ever been to the earnest post-modern pranks of thomas pynchon or umberto eco -- yet with the modernist political commitments of mid-century france. paris may belong to us, but it does not belong in the way we may wish -- this belonging is a dwelling within a space that extends in all directions, a depth as dark…

• Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★★ 12

  conspiracies are the esoteric manifestations of our most deep-seated fears and neuroses; their basis in reality is irrelevant, and uncovering any validity in their complex mechanizations is akin to keeping pace with the nugatory revolutions of an invisible hamster wheel. whether it be an nwo-type evil empire, sketchy used car lot, the assassination of a world-leader, we process that which we perceive internally then project it into this verisimilitude: a serpentine externalization that can’t be sniffed-out or disentangled. there are always revelations occurring. sweet-faced maidens whose long hair hangs down from the open windows of their towers, trapped, held captive there by themselves, trying to suffuse with their flowing locks some shape of order over a landscape of deception and dominion. life in obsession is a self-sustained enterprise.

• Review by reibureibu 3

  Paris belongs to us, the actors and artists and dreamers,
  but can it really? We are poor and vain and estranged from the world.

  Dark figures loom as unseen hands pull threadbare strings,
  behind the closed curtains of which we perform,
  our politics so callow.

  Plots unravel as we act out our own, insinuations tempered before they conclude,
  and one-by-one we disappear, our absences now fuel.

  There become as many dark alleys in the city as there are in the mind,
  and the noir we play inside becomes the same that creeps outside:
  phenomenon becoming real.

  Pieces come together and a shadow results,
  but reality is often illogical; sometimes a shadow has no source.
  Yet we need there to be one, and so our mind sustains the illusion.

  All the world's a stage!

• Review by Diogo Serafim ★★★★½

  rivette’s first film manages to conceive a very specific state of mind during the end of the 50’s and the start of the 60’s (reminding me a lot in this aspect of godard’s ‘le petit soldat’), some sort of confused nihilistic state of impermanence, after the imprevisibility of the immediate post war scenario and before the hope that culminated in 68 (soon vanquished). one of the most unstably structured films of its time (the shakespeare play being an incredible analogy to the film’s production and thematical dimension). there are a lot of political and psychological raptures going on, but they’re all subordinated to fiction, there is a constant sense of fantasy permeating the screen. we feel as dislocated and simultaneously…

• Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★½ 2

  Filmed over the course of three years, and considered as one of the pioneering efforts in the Nouvelle Vague, Rivette's absorbing debut is a mystery film that refuses to be conventional, even if the three-year time span rises some inconsistencies to the surface.

  Since the very beginning, Rivette asks us to make a leap of faith. What is introduced as a suicide slowly escalates into the investigation of an international conspiracy, where the lives of a group of Spaniards seems to be in danger. The style alone and the events discussed, even if misunderstood for a considerable amount of time during the first half, are interesting enough thanks to the performances and some impressionistic glances at the city of Paris…

• Review by Zeke ★★★★ 6

  The Criterion Challenge 2023

  Post-war disillusionment, existentialism, and paranoia, Jacques Rivette's Paris Belongs To Us is a bold and undervalued feature debut in the French New Wave canon. Hitchco*ck-inspired, the film's conspiratorial centre introduces the Rivettian style to the world, albeit still in its infancy. Radical and dense, with complex narrative workings and a theatrical edge that would characterise the auteur, this loose story combines itself as both a sleuth and a coming-of-age. Visually impressive, too, Rivette depicts Paris with beauty and surreptitiousness, containing all of its intricacies and anxieties.

  As a firm believer in Rivette being the 'best' of the Cahiers group, I could certainly go as far as to say that Paris Belongs To Us is the most audacious, and arguably, most mature (although not the best) of the early French New Wave films, at least when it comes to the Right Bank. Rivette supremacy forever!

• Review by Channing Pomeroy ★★★★

  Paris belongs to us because Rivette — like Hugo, Eugène Sue and Balzac — gave Paris to us:

  “A film is, in general, a story built upon an idea; I tried to tell the story of an idea, with the aid of the detective story form; that is to say that, instead of unveiling primary intentions at the end of the story, the denouement can’t do anything but abolish them: ‘Nothing took place but the place.’”

  Location as character. Characters created by the location. These characters are an order of exiles, the French and the expats, workshopping a big play that they may or may not know they are acting in. ”Nightmares are alibis.”

  Rivette is more interested in the…

• Review by Carlos Valladares

  Fragmented, full of silent voices, we’ve already reached the end of the road—and it’s only Rivette’s first go at a feature. So begins his long journey into the loneliness of humanity—the paranoia, the confusion, but also the people-reaching fiction allowed by settling into the unexplored corners of one’s own mind, the exile’s and the freak’s capacity for play therein. In CÉLINE ET JULIE, what will lift us is Alice’s dream; here, what chains is a cold Langian madness, “nightmares are alibis.” Never trust Rivette’s shots—the sinister and the unseen hover just beyond the frame. Pynchon, GRAVITY’S RAINBOW: “If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not…

• Review by Dr. Ethan Lyon ★★★½ 6

  7th Jacques Rivette (after The Story of Marie and Julien, Celine and Julie Go Boating, La Belle Noiseuse, Le Coup de Berger, Secret Defence and Up, Down, Fragile)

  CW- Suicide

  Northampton's finest export, Alan Moore, once noted that the reality of the world is that there is no grand conspiracy controlling the world, rather complete chaos; the conspiracy theory is merely a way to create order and comfort against that rudderlessness. Paris Belongs to Us predicted this nearly forty years before the fact, as a bunch of twenty and thirty somethings wrap themselves up in a shadowy conspiracy never fully explained. Whatever reason for this paranoia does little to alleviate their massive existential dread and result in their ultimate self-destruction.…