Up Down Fragile
(Haut bas fragile)

Screening on Film

Directed by Jacques Rivette.
With Marianne Denicourt, Nathalie Richard, Laurence Côte.
France, 1995, 35mm, color, 169 min.
French with English subtitles.

Rivette pays tribute to MGM’s lowbudget musicals of the 1950s in a work which lovingly defies all expectations of the genre. The film follows three women who are each at a turning point in their lives: one has just awoken from a fiveyear coma, the second is trying to escape her criminal boyfriend, and the third seeks her long-lost birth parents. They dance about the Paris streets before the film makes a surprising, genre-bending transformation. Many of the songs performed in the film were written by the actors themselves and infuse the film with a seemingly incongruous pairing of vérité style and fantastic plotting.