Around a Small Mountain

Around a Small Mountain

On occasion, a movie is simply a story we would have liked to live through. Its message can be as simple as that we all must get through bad times. To regular life can be added some style and artifice, allowing the filmmaker to shape reality into a more pleasing form. Maybe that’s what Jacques Rivette has in mind with “Around a Small Mountain.” One of the founders of the French New Wave, Rivette is still very active at 82.

A run-down little circus is at the heart of this film, playing to small crowds in villages. It becomes his two characters’ home and they meet on their way there. Driving down a road when her car stalls, Kate (Jane Birkin) has Vittorio (Sergio Castellitto) fix it for her: It’s a Meet Cute as old as time. He doesn’t say anything, even. He drives on, slows and turns back around; something about Kate has struck him.

We find out she is going back to the little circus after 15 years. Her father owned it. Her lover was killed in a performance. Vittorio books the room above a local cafe on impulse once he takes stock of the situation. At a performance he breaks the silence by suddenly laughing; even the clowns are shocked.

When the circus caravan pulls out of town, he follows it. It’s not that he and Kate begin an affair. It’s that they’ve both run away to join the circus. He apparently has nowhere else to go and nothing else to do and so does she.

The buried pasts of this particular circus and its performers are revealed. Circuses like this set up little one-ring tents in town squares in rural districts. They still do. One smaller than this operated on The Lido in Venice one night so small that after it was over, the clown came over to our granddaughter Raven and gave her a ride on his mule.

Jane Birkin has a sculpted, intelligent face that probably wouldn’t get her far in U.S. soap opera land, but I find her sexy. She’s a woman who looks like she’s up to something. She’s lived quite a life. She’s 63, looks nowhere near it, was actually one of the two “birds” who were naked in David Hemmings’ photo studio in “Blow-Up.”

What else? She was a famous model during Swinging London, Hermes named its Birkin bag after her, she once played Bardot’s lover in a movie, was married for some years to composer John Barry, was the long-time love of icon Serge Gainsbourg and is the mother of actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, who underwent such rigors in von Trier’s “Antichrist.” It has been quite a life for someone so open and vulnerable-looking.

Here, she represents the loss of her father, lover and circus. I wonder if she’s loved anyone since he died. Vittorio acts as a passive therapist who pushes her to confront her wounds and let them go. This is much more interesting than if Rivette had turned it into a love story. A man and woman who have never met before find themselves talking. How often does that happen?

This is the shortest film Rivette has ever made his “La Belle Noiseuse” (1991), also with Birkin (and one of my Great Movies), runs 236 minutes and not a one too many for me. This comes in at 84 minutes, again just right. Some men, as they age, feel the need to be profound. Rivette embodies the New Wave by needing to be tricky.

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