Paris Belongs to Us

Before the official onset of the French New Wave with Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Godard’s Breathless, critic-turned-filmmaker Jacques Rivette had already started working on his debut feature. The tale of a young literature student (Schneider) and her group of young friends bonded over the death of an acquaintance serves as a time capsule of the social and aesthetic milieu of post-World War II Paris, mirroring a lot of the paranoia and looming spectre of nuclear annihilation permeating through so much of Pynchon’s work.