French New Wave director Jacques Rivette has never ascribed to the tacit agreement that most stories should take somewhere between 90 and 120 minutes to tell. At a mere two and a half hours, Rivette's elegant and deeply satisfying romantic comedy Va Savoir stands as one of his shortest works to date, a bat of the eye compared to his four-hour masterpiece La Belle Noiseuse or the 13-hour Out One. But to watch his films, the impression is not that they're oppressively long, but that other films are too short, with fleeting images that don't allow viewers enough room to get situated with the characters, the composition, and the intent of a given scene. His instincts would seem to run counter to the screwball trappings of Va Savoir, which usually demand a breathless pace and crack comic timing, accumulating speed with each new complication. In Rivette's hands, the genre plays out in slow motion, but the story unfolds with such grace and lightness of touch that it's no less joyful and exhilarating than its more sprightly counterparts. The interconnection between theater and life—a recurring theme in the director's work, from his 1974 benchmark Céline And Julie Go Boating to the 1995 musical Up/Down/Fragile—gets a full workout in the numerous offstage entanglements. With deference to Pirandello's Six Characters In Search Of An Author, Rivette presents six characters that spin off from a touring production of another Pirandello play, As You Desire Me. Returning to Paris for the first time in a few years, lead actress Jeanne Balibar is disenchanted with co-star, director, and current lover Sergio Castellitto, who himself is reeling from the poor ticket sales. Out of boredom more than anything else, Balibar seeks out former boyfriend Jacques Bonnaffé, a ponderous academic living with ballet instructor Marianne Basler. Meanwhile, Castellitto searches the city for a rare, unpublished Goldini manuscript that he plans to adapt for the stage. In the process, he gets some help from Hélène De Fougerolles, a beautiful young graduate student whose family happens to own the complete Goldini archive. But De Fougerolles' devious half-brother, a lothario with designs on Basler, has been secretly pawning the Goldini materials for extra cash. Va Savoir takes perhaps too much time in setting up these relationships, hampered by an opening reel that begs for a more economical director. But once Rivette finally inches his ensemble to the top of the hill, the film glides through its enchanting complications with assurance and humor, building to a conclusion that happily confuses the distinction between art and life. At 73, Rivette has turned out an unexpected trifle that's all the more surprising for its profundity.