Rivette’s first full-length feature is a cross between a time-capsule—Parisian Left-Bank society at its most self-obsessed, mixed with a good dose of cold-war paranoia—and an intriguing game to which no one tells you the rules. Anne (Betty Schneider), a provincial student, is invited to an arty party by her brother. Her first instinct (wise Anne) is to leave immediately. But she doesn’t and is inexorably sucked into a mystery involving an American political refugee called Philip Kaufman; a self-destructive femme fatale called Terry Yordan; and a Spanish activist called Juan who recently committed suicide. Starting with a shot from a train coming into the city, the film is as much about its setting —a long-vanished Paris full of fleabag hotels and corduroy-clad intellectuals—as about its story. And all the elements of Rivette’s later work are here: Anne is drafted into, then abruptly dumped from, a production of Shakespeare’s strangest play, Pericles, which, like the film, seems to belong in another dimension. Charles Bitsch’s cinematography is extraordinary, managing to be both luminous and ominous at the same time. And the whole film is suffused with an irony that prefigures Rivette’s later fascination with the gaps between character and performance, narrative and reality.— Nick Roddick.