Haut bas fragile is one of Jacques Rivette’s most beautiful assertions of the world
as a playground, so easily and constantly enjoyable that its radical
strangeness is rapidly absorbed or overlooked. Just as a small example, the
film would generally be labeled as a musical, but the first such number doesn’t
arise until well over an hour into the film, and one of the three main characters
(all followed through separate, occasionally intertwining narratives) is
excluded from any singing or dancing…except that she’s haunted by a song she’s
had in her head since childhood, that she believes might lead her to her birth
mother, thus in a sense making her story the most purely musical of all. The
film teems with elements of quasi-mythology or fairy-tale - a woman waking up
after years in a coma, finding herself the owner of a mystery-filled house left
to her by a deceased aunt; a mysterious underground society where the members
engage in a form of Russian roulette (it turns out to be a fake, but still…); peculiar
encounters with men, or with cats – but never feels like a work of frivolity or
denial, with none of the three strands providing perfect closure. On the
contrary, all three women in a sense choose to defer discovery and
accountability, all the better to keep moving unpredictably through life (nevertheless,
one comes away with the general sense of a happy ending, as one would wish).
The highly theatrical dance choreography forms its own interrogation of life
and cinema: one character moves as if openly trying to possess the entire floor,
another oscillates between minimal moves and sudden extreme, jagged poses, as
if to preserve an element of surprise; all of which (in combination with the quirkily
beguiling songs) render the musical sequences not so much an adornment or
expressive addition, but a counterpointing source of mystery and reverie. The
cast (including Marianne Denicourt and Anna Karina) is almost pure delight.
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