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CHARLES TAYOR.. SALON MAGAZINE

UP/DOWN/FRAGILE

In movies, as in novels, length is often equated with importance.

When a movie creeps past the two-and-a-half hour mark ("Oscar

length," as some of my colleagues say), it's usually because the

subject is "epic." French director Jacques Rivette makes movies

that routinely run to three or four hours or even longer, and yet

his subjects are almost always resolutely ordinary. The plot of his

1995 musical "Haut/bas/fragile" ("Up/down/fragile") could easily

be summed up as "three gals in Paris." For nearly three hours

Rivette follows a trio of young women (Natalie Richard,

Marianne Denicourt and Laurence Côte) over the course of a

Parisian summer, bringing each to a moment of decision about

her future, and then ending the movie, seemingly as arbitrarily as

he began it.

"Haut/bas/fragile" doesn't contain a wealth of incident or reach

big, dramatic climaxes. Even the musical numbers appear

sporadically, casually. The length allows us to enter the picture,

wade around in it, savor the ordinary moments that pass us by in

life, let alone in movies. In one of the scenes that moves me most

(for you it may be another), Côte's Ida comes home from work,

puts away her groceries, greets her cat and settles down to read a

letter from her parents. That's all that happens, but the scene

radiates freedom, the freedom of having your own place, of

looking after yourself for the first time, even the freedom to be

in a funk -- as Ida is -- over where your life is headed. Rivette is

trying to do in film something like what Manet did with "Le

déjeuner sur l'herbe." He wants us to become so alive to our

surroundings that we can appreciate the deep satisfaction of a

suspended idyll.

Despite the ordinariness of his subjects and his settings, Rivette is

no naturalist. He adores the coincidences of 19th century novels,

as well as the conventions of Gothic tales, ghost stories and

melodrama. His films typically contain grand old houses with

locked rooms or hidden compartments that may yield the solution

to a mystery. Sometimes they only create bigger mysteries, like

the locked door in "Love on the Ground," behind which can be

heard the roar of the ocean. Rivette doesn't solve these mysteries.

If he did, that would be the end of the story, and Rivette loves

stories. His plots are often like the walls of the house that

Denicourt's Louise inherits from her aunt: They're dotted with

places where pictures once hung, leaving us to wonder what the

pictures might have been.

Rivette's films are collaborations with both the cast (who are

involved in creating their roles and determining where the story

will take them) and with the audience. In "Haut/bas/fragile," it's

up to us to decide whether Ninon will own up to the secret she's

kept hidden from her employer; whether Louise will find

happiness with Lucien (Bruno Tedeschini), the young man her

wealthy, overly solicitous father has hired to keep an eye on her;

whether Ida, who's adopted, has actually discovered her real

mother. Rivette involves us in the processes of storytelling in

order to keep the conventions he loves from becoming frozen in

place. We must sift through the stories to find what's most alive

in them.

That approach is perfect for "Haut/bas/fragile" because the movie

is about the impossibility of taking responsibility for anyone's

life other than your own. All three of Rivette's women are in the

process of reinventing themselves. Louise, whom one character

likens to a sleepwalker, has just awaked after five years in a coma

(I told you Rivette was no naturalist). Ninon (Richard, who

played the costume designer in love with Maggie Cheung in

"Irma Vep") is starting over as a moped courier after leaving her

pimp. Ida, the youngest and least settled of the three, is in the

holding pattern of someone just starting her life. Convinced she

needs to find out where she came from before her life can begin,

she's offered teasing clues by the strangers who remark on how

familiar she looks, and by the elusive song she hears wafting in

from faraway radios and being hummed by passersby, a song

she's convinced she can remember from the womb.

The musical numbers in "Haut/bas/fragile" achieve what Woody

Allen failed to do in "Everyone Says I Love You." Allen

expected us to be charmed by watching actors perform songs and

dance numbers without the technique to bring them off. Here, the

actors had a hand in writing the songs they perform, and like

their dance movements, they're kept simple. Using very modest

means, Rivette gives "Haut/bas/fragile" that special quality movie

musicals sometimes achieve, in which the actors' simplest

movements seem a form of dance. When Ninon and her suitor

dance around his scene shop, or Lucien and Louise perform a

lovely pas de deux in a park gazebo, there's grace in the slow

extension of an arm, the arch of a back. And Rivette knows how

to shoot dance scenes, a seemingly simple task that countless

directors screw up by moving the camera in too close and not

allowing us to see the full bodies of the dancers.

Rivette acknowledges his movie's debt to low-budget MGM

musicals of the 1950s, like Stanley Donen's "Give the Girl a

Break," but his roots go much deeper. Like Truffaut, Godard,

Rohmer and Chabrol -- his fellow Cahiers du Cinema critics who

went on to create the French New Wave -- Rivette reaches back

to the gentle, unforced lyricism of French films of the '30s, the

era of Renoir and Vigo and Rene Clair. In "Haut/bas/fragile," the

streets and parks of Paris have a pink-gray luminescence, and life

seems to proceed on an updraft of slightly melancholy buoyancy.

Now 70 and one of the giants among living filmmakers, Rivette

has never wavered from his madly ambitious determination to

preserve and poeticize the most fleeting moments of life in his

films. Rivette's greatest legacy may be the new way you look at

your city when you emerge from one of his movies, suddenly

seeing the beauty of overlooked buildings, the charm of

tucked-away parks, the comfort of small apartments. There are

millions of stories in Rivette's naked city, and they're all ours for

the making.

(If your video store doesn't stock "Haut/bas/fragile," you can

request that the store order it -- or purchase it yourself -- from

its distributor, Cinema Parallel.)

SALON | Sept. 1, 1998

Charles Taylor's Home Movies video column appears every Tuesday in Salon.