Like so many of Rivette's films, this limber summer caprice uses Paris as the proscenium for a drama of rehearsals and reversals. While by night their production of Pirandello's As You Desire Me plays to comically sparse houses, by day the primary players in a traveling Italian theater troupe—Camille (Jeanne Balibar), an angular diva with a past in Paris, and her partner-director Ugo (Sergio Castellitto)—follow their own digressive desires. Camille skirts around her ex, author of a thesis entitled “Heidegger, The Jealous One,” and his new lover; Ugo's quest for a lost Goldoni manuscript leads him to a nubile blonde classicist and her shady half-brother. As the criss-crossing paths of these three women and three men traverse the streets, book-lined rooms, and rooftops of the city, the film's elegant, lucid structure flexes to encompass increasingly irrational acts. Naturally, all roads lead to the theater, where surprise and delight are waiting in the wings.
—Juliet Clark