Up, Down, Fragile (1995) User Reviews

Good modern French film

[Daniel Karlsson · 10/10 · 13 March 2002]

You can trust Rivette. The New Wave is not dead! Fresh and enlightening, definitely not boring (despite the Rivette-standard-length). People in Paris during summertime whose stories link together. A sort of ball of yarn that unrolls more and more as you go on watching. The dancing scenes are top-notch. Good Paris views. Any fans of the New Wave films should not miss this film; Anna Karina has a pretty big role and she does it good as ever. She has aged though, as you will see. My favorite scene is in the end when the camera shows inside Karina's house and one of the walls is filled with old posters of Karina. And she says something like: don't bother about that old rubbish.

I'll vote it a 4 out of 5. Watchers unfamiliar with French films in general and The New Wave in particular maybe won't find it very interesting though.

Big applause for Rivette, Richard, and Denicourt

[sleepsev · 10/10 · 1 November 2000]

Superb! Excellent! Two-Thumbs Up! Gratifying! Captivating! Sumptuously Made!

That's still less than half of what I want to say for this film. I saw this film once in February, and completely fell in love with it. When it was shown in a cinema here again in October, I went to see it, doubting if my enjoyment would lessen in the second viewing when it loses all its unpredictability. But I found that my love for it grows even stronger. And I don't mind seeing it over and over again. For me, its running time seems like less than an hour. It makes time fly so quickly. Though a part of me think the film ends at the right point and at the right time, another part of me still yearns to see more of these characters. Nathalie Richard and Marianne Denicourt shines so brightly in this movie. Though I had seen a few films of Richard and Denicourt, it is this film that made me fall in love with them. From this film, I can see that Richard is very talented, and Denicourt is really alluring. I hope they will be very famous and I will have a chance to see many more of their works. Andre Marcon (Roland) is quite good too. As for Laurence Cote (Ida) and Bruno Todeschini, though they might be talented, their roles here are not of very pleasant, cheerful or likeable characters, and seem to require less range of expressive emotions than other characters. (Bruno is a lot more gorgeous in "Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train.") The choreography in this movie is my most favourite of all time. I have never seen any choreography like this before. I also like one irony in this film: Ninon wants to reveal a character's wrongdoing ,but his wrongdoing is in a way similar to her own. Songs here are very beautiful, and I'm quite impressed by Enzo Enzo. I really like the "shock therapy" scene, and an early scene in which Denicourt shows her unexpected strength is not only very comical, but also unforgettable to me.I think I would have a great fun if I could live my life in Rivette's universe, as Ninon, Louise, Celine, or Julie. Though "Celine and Julie Go Boating" is still my most favourite film by Rivette, I think "Haut bas fragile" deserves to be called one the 10 best films of the 1990's.

The best Rivette film and one of the highlights of the 90's.

[Alfonse-2 · 10/10 · 2 July 1999]

Although the film was released in Germany with only one copy I believe that it is not only Rivette's best film and that does mean very much but also one of the best movies of the 90's. It's Rivette's most funny and most light film. The female characters and his look at Paris is even more wonderful than in his other movies. As in all of Rivette's film everything can happen and the film is indeed full of wonderful surprises. But mostly I admire Haut bas fragile for Rivette's sense of the possibilities of the cinema which has become a very rare thing in our days.

Worlds in precarious balance.

[Delly · 24 October 2005]

Haut Bas Fragile is the loosely intertwined, loosely musical tale of three girls: Louise, Ninon and Ida, as well as their flirtations with Roland, a set designer -- it would be useful here to recall Vincente Minnelli's original profession.

Haut Bas Fragile is as elusive as anything Rivette has made, that is to say, as elusive as any movie ever made, and as always one must be vigilant. For instance, we are told that Louise ( Mariane Denicourt, looking like Audrey Tautou crossed with a supermodel ) has just emerged from a five-year coma. But how could someone who just woke out of a coma know jujitsu? Those familiar with Rivette know that actors and roleplaying are his big theme. And in Haut Bas Fragile, whenever people start to sing, that's when they're lying to each other... Only Ninon's dance, a metaphor for Rivette's directing style, is fully in the moment and liberated from the fictions of both an imagined past ( Ida, an orphan searching for her birth parents ) and an imagined future ( Louise, who only cares about money. ) Keeping that in mind, couldn't Louise be an actress HIRED by the crooked tycoon in order to retrieve the incriminating papers, rather than his daughter like she says? The story they concoct together would be perfect, because the man who has removed the papers from the aunt's house is the classic Rivettean artist and resurrected Round Table knight -- he's even called Roland -- who not only buys Louise's improbable story but helps her EMBELLISH it in order to, as he thinks, protect her. But Louise is one of the most monstrous characters in Rivette's films, more so even than Walser from Secret Defense. Imagine Jean Seberg as Karl Rove's hit-man and you'll get the idea of how treacherous this character is -- poetic Nouvelle Vague muse on the outside, hollow servant of capitalism on the inside.

Haut Bas Fragile must be Rivette's most despairing film. It establishes the present moment as emotionally and aesthetically dead and seems to swoon over the beauty of the past ( Louise's aunt's house, the sets that Roland builds, Anna Karina ) before telling us that that's a lie too. As Karina says at one point, when she catches Ida looking at pictures of her in all her nubile glory, "Don't look at those old things." Karina, by the way, is only the most blatant among a labyrinthine amount of cross-connections and references to other French films, characters and real-life people. For instance, the voice of Louise's father is played by Laszlo Szabo, who not only was the Wizard of Oz-like Virgil from Rivette's L'Amour Par Terre, but was the man who stole Karina away from Belmondo-as-Godard in Pierrot Le Fou! Along with the pointed subplot about stolen papers and cutthroat business practices in the 60's -- gilded age of the New Wave -- this can't help but make a fan of the era wonder... Does Rivette think that Godard has undeservedly eclipsed his reputation, and has he been holding a torch for Karina all these years? ( As Marie et Julien proves, he definitely has a lost love deep in his past. )

For all its devious brilliance, I must say that this film is weaker than its equally dark follow-up and sister film, Secret Defense. The pacing is surprisingly choppy, there are dips in tension and involvement, and the musical numbers are indifferently staged. Rivette must have thought that using amateur dancers and generic songs would give the movie a raw vitality missing from the more wedding-cake MGM films of the 50's, but that was a condescending mistake. Rivette may not realize that there is as much cynical social commentary in Gigi or The Band Wagon as there is in Haut Bas Fragile, and that it is precisely the big-budgets and elaborate routines that make those movies so subversive. Minnelli's resolutely fake backlots are taking on a sur-reality with time that may one day make Rivette's more studied "real reality," to quote Pola X, seem... kind of unreal. Considering Rivette's ambiguous relation with the past, though, along with his persistent suggestion that it doesn't even exist, maybe this was exactly the point.

A bore

[zetes · 3/10 · 23 July 2012]

I'm not very familiar with Rivette, but I did enjoy the other two films I've seen by him (three, technically, counting his Joan of Arc movie as two). This one - I did not enjoy it. It's as purposeless and indifferent as Celine and Julie Go Boating, but nowhere near as enjoyable. It has a handful of enjoyable moments - mostly in its song and dance numbers (it's a musical - when Rivette feels like it). And the three stars, Nathalie Richard, Marianne Denicourt and Laurence Côte, are all quite cute. But, man, does this go absolutely nowhere for nearly three hours. I can only watch Richard dance around like a dope for two hours, tops. Anna Karina also has a small part. I feel like I deserve a trophy for getting through this - I felt like giving up 40 minutes in and I really wish I had.

Beautiful

[spechax · 10/10 · 14 March 2002]

One can see that the director really loves his actors, his work, and his audience. Perfect. The librarian girl subplot is so touching, especially the end! My only complain is "The voice of the father" - I understand, that it's supposed to sound "alienated", but it sounds completely unnatural, like it was just an imagination of Louise, or a tape playing. Anyway, this is a beautiful film. 10 stars.

slow torture

[heartonastring7 · 1/10 · 26 November 2006]

Bad, Bad, Awful........It was the worst film I have ever seen. It was dragged on for about three hours and in the end you were given a question mark. Bad acting, awful music and dancing, and the story line was boring. I don't know why so many people gave it such a good rating, it baffles me. Other people's comments lead me to watch this awful movie. There are so many other good French movies, why waste your time with this one? Where to begin with the horror, the acting. The main character Louise looks like a bad Audrey Hepburn. In the beginning of the movie she has just come out of a coma and is said to be weak. Though that didn't stop her from fighting a guy who was attacking her bodyguard. Much of the story line seemed extremely fictional and confusing. One Instance of this is when her bodyguard somehow turns into her lover over night. Then there is Ida, a girl who was adopted as a child and is now longing to know where she comes from. Ida's story is the most confusing, because you're left wondering why the script writers put it in the movie. It is the shortest and has no significance in the movie. The last girl in the movie is Ninon, a trouble maker who finally tries to do right with Louise. Let's just say I didn't like the way she broke out in abstract dance where ever she went. It was bad from the beginning till the end, and from the script to the music.

a fairytale for grown-ups

[pavel_zaprianov · 10/10 · 16 November 2009]

Jacques Rivette. Once again showing us summertime Paris and looking for adventures in it. And once again he succeeds in that. It's like the whole movie is in slow motion and I guess it does not surprise anyone familiar with the work of this great director, but this does not make the movie boring, but rather magical, during the movie we slowly move into a world, where nothing happens as it would happen in real life (a girl collects all her stuff in shoe-boxes, another cures herself from vertigo with a shock therapy by a card game), but everything seems realistic. This is a trick that Rivette is very good at. In fact this is his form of surrealism that he started to develop at the seventies with "Out 1" and "Celine And Julie Go Boating". Achieving this thing by telling about mysteries and shooting his movies with the documentary style pioneered by the Nouvelle Vague and by the director his self he combines the best of Bunuel and Rohmer. Rivette has a fascination with several things: Paris, theater, conspiracies and young women. In this work he tells us a story about three young women in Paris, each of whom looking for herself. Two of these women solve a big mystery at by trying to put their lives in order, while the third one is the typical for Rivette's movies female outsider. Rivette chooses summer to show us Paris with it's wonderful locations and so parks, cafés and small quiet streets are the tool for him to give to the movie an atmosphere of the film, which is colorful and joyful. This atmosphere is achieved also by the fact that almost all of the characters are young and by the several love stories that are told among everything else. One of the most beautiful movies ever.

Silly and tiresome

[humphrey-2 · 1/10 · 26 January 2002]

I didn't like it at all, it seemed pointless and silly to me. Just having those two random musical numbers seemed daft rather than stylish. That "Cole Porter" song was horrible.

The subplot about the strange murder game just petered out, it didn't make any sense to me at all. There was also an strange moment when Nino and Louise suddenly were great pals, walking down the street arm in arm, having only met vaguely before that.

It could have been intriguing and fun, but I thought it was fake whimsical and boring.

It was the only thing with English subtitles here in Vientiane, but I wish I hadn't bothered.

Hi Lili Hi LOW

[writers_reign · 5/10 · 27 May 2006]

At university I was once obliged to reply in the form of an essay to the question 'Would Moby Dick be a better or worse book if the scientific sections were omitted'. My reply was along the lines of 'If the scientific parts were omitted Moby Dick would be a shorter bad book' and that's how I often feel about Rivette who seems incapable of shooting anything less than three hours - nothing wrong with that, witness Gone With The Wind - which is okay EXCEPT his ideas are usually worth no more than forty minutes. He exemplifies most of the things wrong with the New Wave, the abrupt cutting in the middle of a scene, characters appearing on the other side of town moments after walking out of frame, insufficient 'back story' and/or information. A typical example in this film. Roland confronts Ninon in her apartment and accuses her of stealing a set of documents (which we have in fact seen her do). She tells him to close his eyes, he obliges, she retrieves the documents from where she had hidden them, tells him to remain seated with his eyes closed and - wait for it - LEAVES the apartment, goes across town and gives the papers to Louise after which they go to a night club and dance. In the next shot Ninon enters her apartment Where, incredibly, Roland is STILL sitting with his eyes closed; in real time this would have to be several hours but Rivette shoots it in such a way as to give the impression of just a few minutes. Okay, call this high Art if you will but Me, I call it SLOPPY film making. The film is full of such sloppiness; it's billed as a Musical yet the first number occurs more than an hour into the story and such music as there is is banal in the extreme. The plot, or what passes for one, is our old friend the three disparate lives who somehow contrive to interweave; the three leading actresses are certainly competent or even slightly better than competent as are the males but there are too many dead ends like the faux suicide club which amounts to little more than a twenty minute self-contained set piece inside a three hour movie and serves no discernible purpose. Ironically I thoroughly enjoyed Rivette's Va Savoir and there are certainly echoes of that movie here in the library scenes and the dormer window utilised by Jeanne Balibar in the latter. On balance this is one to be endured rather than enjoyed.

That's boring crap!

[label · 1/10 · 5 March 2001]

The dance scenes were too long, the chansons didn't really match with the plot. The only cool scene was the deadly game with the mysterious club owner. Without the singing and dancing stuff it could be a wonderful movie about the story of the three women which are linked together in a special way.

After half of the time I was the only one left in the cinema watching the boring movie. Even my french flatmate didn't like the movie.

If you like to see a better (and typical) french movie then choose "La vie est une chanson".

A beautiful assertion of the world as playground

[philosopherjack · 17 December 2021]

Haut bas fragile is one of Jacques Rivette's most beautiful assertions of the world as a playground, so easily and constantly enjoyable that its radical strangeness is rapidly absorbed or overlooked. Just as a small example, the film would generally be labeled as a musical, but the first such number doesn't arise until well over an hour into the film, and one of the three main characters (all followed through separate, occasionally intertwining narratives) is excluded from any singing or dancing...except that she's haunted by a song she's had in her head since childhood, that she believes might lead her to her birth mother, thus in a sense making her story the most purely musical of all. The film teems with elements of quasi-mythology or fairy-tale - a woman waking up after years in a coma, finding herself the owner of a mystery-filled house left to her by a deceased aunt; a mysterious underground society where the members engage in a form of Russian roulette (it turns out to be a fake, but still...); peculiar encounters with men, or with cats - but never feels like a work of frivolity or denial, with none of the three strands providing perfect closure. On the contrary, all three women in a sense choose to defer discovery and accountability, all the better to keep moving unpredictably through life (nevertheless, one comes away with the general sense of a happy ending, as one would wish). The highly theatrical dance choreography forms its own interrogation of life and cinema: one character moves as if openly trying to possess the entire floor, another oscillates between minimal moves and sudden extreme, jagged poses, as if to preserve an element of surprise; all of which (in combination with the quirkily beguiling songs) render the musical sequences not so much an adornment or expressive addition, but a counterpointing source of mystery and reverie. The cast (including Marianne Denicourt and Anna Karina) is almost pure delight.