This film has pretensions of being an art film. I am a believer that art should delight and entertain as a result of its excellence. The reality of "Va Savoir" is that it delivers an absolutely dreadful movie, badly made with insipid performances. VERRRRRY boring and overly long. This movie is not a pleasure to watch, which disqualifies it as art, in my view.
In an brazen attempt to grab the viewer's interest, the makers of the movie inserted a shower scene with Jeanne Balibar followed by a flash of her muffy, around the middle of the film. The shower scene doesn't clarify or advance the plot. Plus Ms. Balibar's scrawny body is the wrong subject for this desperate attempt at commercialism. When gratuitous nudity fails to redeem a movie for me, then there's something definitely wrong.
My French isn't fluent, so I must watch French films in subtitles. I still enjoy following the French soundtrack and evaluating the quality of the English translation. The subtitling of "Va Savoir" is generally good, using the best colloquial English equivalent to the French. Some of the rawer French is slightly sanitized, however. Unfortunately, the soundtrack for the subtitled version I saw was muffled and indistinct. I prefer subtitled foreign films to dubbed movies to hear the expression of the actors delivering their lines. The soundtrack of the version I watched was so bad that I couldn't connect with what the actors were trying to convey. Or perhaps there wasn't anything to convey.
The Italian play didn't add to any understanding of the film. These scenes could have done with some heavy editing and perhaps something coherent could have emerged. Jeanne Balibar's Italian sounded synthetic, monotonous and wooden to me. I don't know Italian stage conventions but Sergio Castellitto was quite expressive in the play. In fact, to see how to show expression in one's second language, one need look no further than Sergio Castellitto's performance in the French language. As a final comment, I've had enough of the genre of actors portraying actors. To me, that's not a stretch. It's not just the French that bore me with this kind of story. Hollywood and the TV Networks fall into the trap of displaying their own tiny little world. When an actor or actress does working class and does it realistically, then that's art. Check out "Frankie and Johnny", "Tampopo" or "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" for the best of the working poor on film.
In an brazen attempt to grab the viewer's interest, the makers of the movie inserted a shower scene with Jeanne Balibar followed by a flash of her muffy, around the middle of the film. The shower scene doesn't clarify or advance the plot. Plus Ms. Balibar's scrawny body is the wrong subject for this desperate attempt at commercialism. When gratuitous nudity fails to redeem a movie for me, then there's something definitely wrong.
My French isn't fluent, so I must watch French films in subtitles. I still enjoy following the French soundtrack and evaluating the quality of the English translation. The subtitling of "Va Savoir" is generally good, using the best colloquial English equivalent to the French. Some of the rawer French is slightly sanitized, however. Unfortunately, the soundtrack for the subtitled version I saw was muffled and indistinct. I prefer subtitled foreign films to dubbed movies to hear the expression of the actors delivering their lines. The soundtrack of the version I watched was so bad that I couldn't connect with what the actors were trying to convey. Or perhaps there wasn't anything to convey.
The Italian play didn't add to any understanding of the film. These scenes could have done with some heavy editing and perhaps something coherent could have emerged. Jeanne Balibar's Italian sounded synthetic, monotonous and wooden to me. I don't know Italian stage conventions but Sergio Castellitto was quite expressive in the play. In fact, to see how to show expression in one's second language, one need look no further than Sergio Castellitto's performance in the French language. As a final comment, I've had enough of the genre of actors portraying actors. To me, that's not a stretch. It's not just the French that bore me with this kind of story. Hollywood and the TV Networks fall into the trap of displaying their own tiny little world. When an actor or actress does working class and does it realistically, then that's art. Check out "Frankie and Johnny", "Tampopo" or "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" for the best of the working poor on film.