Haut/bas/fragile Directed by Jacques Rivette Starring Natalie Richard, Marianne Denicourt and Laurence Côte A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow "Star Trek" returns; premiere dates for "ER," "X-Files" and more Now Showing New video releases for Sept. 1 Y E S T E R D A Y Monicagate: The movie By Tim Cavanaugh Hollywood's hottest script doctor makes a house call -- to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. (08/31/98) R E C E N T_. M O V I E S 54 Reviewed by Charles Taylor Instead of offering a comic portrait of '70s excess, "54" is a disappointing '90s-style morality tale (08/28/98) Slums of Beverly Hills Reviewed by Mary Elizabeth Williams Tamara Jenkins' debut feature is a gritty, nostalgic trip through the wrong side of 90210 (08/28/98) Home Movies By Charles Taylor "On Her Majesty's Secret Service": James Bond gets a life (08/25/98) Jungle love By Laura Miller Two new movies take a look at why, when it comes to romance, people treat each other so badly (08/21/98) Blade Reviewed by Charles Taylor Despite a thin plot and thick directing, Wesley Snipes' new superhero flick is a bloody good time (08/20/98) BROWSE THE MOVIE ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS

[ H O M E_.M O V I E S_.B Y_.C H A R L E S_.T A Y L O R ]___ __________________idyll w _o _r _s _h _i _..p ________- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - _____The great French director Jacques Rivette _____________sings the everyday ecstasies of life in Paris. 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. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - N O W_S H O W I N G [ New releases available Sept. 1 ] Titanic Barney's Great Adventure: The Movie Dream for an Insomniac Homegrown