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Ragged but Right: Rivette’s Up Down Fragile
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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194 Ragged but Right Rivette’s Up Down Fragile The inspiration of Up Down Fragile? The MGM low-budget films of the ∑≠s that were shot in four or five weeks on sets left over from other films. In particular, a Stanley Donen movie, Give a Girl a Break [∞Ω∑≥], a simple film shot in next to no time with short dance numbers. —Jacques Rivette in an interview Entertainment does not . . . present models of utopian worlds, as in the classic utopias of Sir Thomas More, William Morris et al. Rather the utopianism is contained in the feelings it embodies. It presents, head-on as it were, what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organized. —Richard Dyer, ‘‘Entertainment and Utopia’’ Out of Jacques Rivette’s seventeen features to date—in which I include his twelvehour serial Out 1 (1970) as well as both parts of his Jeanne la pucelle (1994)—nine are set in contemporary Paris. And few other movies I can think of infuse that city with the same kind of distilled, everyday poetry. For Rivette, Paris is a city of secrets and puzzles, of hidden alliances and privileged locations—a park bench here, a courtyard there—forming the nexus of magical encounters. 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. 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 OTHER CANONS, OTHER CANONIZERS 195 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 the adjacent office and a nearby atelier, where Roland—the closest thing this movie has to a male hero (and André Marcon is a dead ringer at moments for Gene Kelly)—works as a set designer. The location reminds me of the courtyard in Jean Renoir’s The Crime of Monsieur Lange and other such hangouts in populist French movies of the 30s. But if this alleyway seems like the relaxed setting for a proletarian musical, other locations suggest different classes. The movie’s upper-crust heroine, Louise (Marianne Denicourt)—who’s just settling in at a Paris hotel after several years in a coma in a provincial clinic—tends to gravitate toward decorous settings in and around parks; one of her favorite spots is a bench on the rue du Moulin de la Pointe that seems to have been designed for Leslie Caron. The third heroine, Ida (Laurence Cote), is neither working-class nor wealthy: she’s a librarian at the Library of Decorative Arts, where Roland sometimes goes for research. Like Louise she favors parks, but less decorous portions of them. We often find her at a stand selling crepes and hot dogs, where early in the movie she flees from a crazylooking man named Monsieur Paul who asks, ‘‘Haven’t I seen you before?’’ (Rivette himself plays the man, and the fact that he cast Cote in The Gang of Four may be...