Alto, basso, fragile

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.

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".

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.

Most of the reviews here either call it amazing or trash, either could be true.

I think Haut Bas Fragile has some redeeming qualities, notably the portrayal of 90s Paris, unique characters and interesting ways in which they are built in the audience's mind, and good artistic direction. If you're interested in a movie like that, I honestly recommend trying it, I thought it was interesting to see Rivette use a more modern setting, and as always, he uses setting well.

That said, I did not enjoy this movie. I thought the musical elements were thrown in without proper contexts, it's kind of a musical at times, but if you said that to someone, they'd become confused as they watch the first hour or so and see no sung musical numbers, and then even more confused when they suddenly start happening without explanation. The music was a weird mesh of 90s style music and older, more usual musical like songs, this could work, but didn't in this movie, in my opinion.

As well, there are a number of simply strange choices that don't seem to have deeper meaning, the dad's tape voice, the strange fling with the bodyguard, the aforementioned unexpected musical numbers, etc. These strange choices could've worked in a movie that was deigned around them, and Rivette is obviously capable of being surreal, but this just seems random more than surreal to me.

Also, while the movie is Rivette's normal great length, it doesn't develop the characters, mood, or ideas well; it seems to use time inefficiently.

I think the movie is interesting, but to me, it's more of a 'what if' kind of interest (what if Rivette made a more modern musical type movie while retaining his style, and the style of French new wave), rather than a 'I am interested by the plot' kind of interest.

Overall, I think if you want surreal but meaningful + female friendship, watch Celine & Julie, if you want multiple distinct and interesting characters that all contribute to an interesting plot, watch The Gang of Four, if you want to look at Paris, watch Le Pont du Nord, and if you want a musical, watch someone else. That said, if you like Rivette and have already seen much of his other work, give it a try, see if you like it.