Haut bas fragile

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.