Up Down Fragile
With Cote, Denicourt, Richard, Anna Karina, Andre Marcon, Bruno Todeschini, Wilfre Benaiche, Enzo Enzo, and the voice of Laszlo Szabo
In a way, the title of Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us says it all. Solitude and togetherness are the two great themes of his work, often intertwined like the melodic lines of a fugue, and Paris often seems to function as the orchestra that performs and places those melodies, charts their coexistence and their interplay. A city that in many ways seems designed, choreographed, and even lit to provide the settings for romantic musicals–as evidenced in such films as An American in Paris and Funny Face–Paris belongs to loners, couples, and groups, all of whom bring something sad or euphoric to the city as well as take something away from it. It’s a kind of give-and-take we often associate with characters in a musical, interacting singly or collectively but always romantically with their environment.
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Haut bas fragile (“Up Down Fragile”)–a 1995 release receiving its U.S. theatrical premiere at the Music Box this week because no New York theater has been willing to give it a run–is the first of Rivette’s films to literally profit from Paris’s ideal qualifications as the setting for a musical. One of the privileged sites is the alleyway outside a delivery service called Vitébien (which one could translate roughly as “Quick ‘n’ Spiffy”), where Ninon (Nathalie Richard), one of the three youthful heroines, parks her moped and chats with her coworkers between deliveries (the movie’s title alludes to the instructions often stamped on parcels). Because the film is set during the summer, doors and windows tend to remain open, and part of what makes this spot a magical nexus, with pathways stretching out in all directions, are such proximate details as an upstairs neighbor who calls down to people in the alley and adjacent office and a nearby atelier, where Roland–the closest thing this movie has to a male hero (and Andre Marcon is a dead ringer at moments for Gene Kelly)–works as a set designer.
A whole hour of Up Down Fragile passes before the first song-and-dance number. But during that hour Rivette takes a lot of steps–in metaphysical, stylistic, musical, directorial, and choreographic terms–tracing the passage between real life and musical numbers. The same sort of steps are taken throughout the remaining hour and a half of Up Down Fragile, sometimes leading up to or away from musical numbers, sometimes not.
O’Connor’s number in the pavilion in I Love Melvin is a virtuoso turn performed on roller skates; Nathalie Richard in Up Down Fragile–the closest thing to a real dancer in Rivette’s movie–makes some of her deliveries on Rollerblades, quite gracefully but without performing any of O’Connor’s awesome acrobatics. Is O’Connor automatically a “better” performer than Richard, or I Love Melvin a “better” movie than Up Down Fragile? Criticizing the performances here is a bit like complaining that Thelonious Monk lacked the piano technique of Art Tatum; maybe so, but Monk still had all he needed to say what he wanted to say. Or as Duke Ellington once put it, more succinctly, “If it sounds good, it is good.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photograph, two women in still from film (possible Cote, Denicourt, Anna Karina, Wilfre Benaiche).
